How big a backyard do you need to live off land?

Original post:  ... lost it :-(

What is Oil Pulling?

Oil pulling – Do you want to brighten up your smile without using harsh chemicals?

Bleach trays and teeth whitening products do make your smile brighter but they also strip away precious enamel that could ultimately result in the thinning of your teeth. Plus, most of these products are packed with toxins such as coal tars, fluorides, aspartame, aluminum and benzene.

If you want whiter teeth without ingesting harmful carcinogens then try oil pulling.

Oil pulling is an ancient Ayurvedic ritual where you swish oil (teaspoon of sesame oil or sunflower oil) around in your mouth for about 20 minutes and then spit it out. At first you have to get used to swishing around oil for 20 minutes but over-time you get will get more comfortable.
Oil pulling goes beyond teeth whitening.  According to Dr. Karach, M.D., “oil pulling treats headaches, bronchitis, tooth pain, eczema, ulcers, and much more.”
Dr. Bruce Fife, whose written an entire book on oil pulling, says the oil acts like a cleanser.
“When you put it in your mouth and work it around your teeth and gums it “pulls” out bacteria and other debris. As simple as it is, oil pulling has a very powerful detoxifying effect. Our mouths are the home to billions of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other parasites and their toxins. Candida and Streptococcus are common residents in our mouths. It is these types of germs and their toxic waste products that cause gum disease and tooth decay and contribute to many other health problems including arthritis and heart disease. Our immune system is constantly fighting these troublemakers. If our immune system becomes overloaded or burdened by excessive stress, poor diet, environmental toxins and such, these organisms can spread throughout the body causing secondary infections and chronic inflammation, leading to any number of health problems.”
Oil pulling (best to do it before breakfast) this  is incredibly effective for:

Peace

• Brightening & whitening teeth
• Healthier gums
• Removal of mucus
• Boosting the immune system
• Preventing bad breath
• Increasing energy
• Having a clearer mind
• Decreasing headaches
• Clearing the sinuses
• Alleviating allergies
• Better sleep
• More clearer skin
• Regulating menstrual cycles
• Decreasing inflammation
• Improving the lymphatic system
• Improving PMS symptoms

How to oil pull:

• Drink 1 cup of water on an empty stomach (best to do it before breakfast).
• Use 1-3 teaspoon of organic, cold-pressed vegetable oil (sesame oil is shown to work best) in your mouth
• Swish through your mouth for 20 minutes while you’re busy doing something else like checking your emails.
•  After 10-15 minutes the oil will become thin and white as it emulsifies with your saliva.
• Spit into trash, compost or outside in the grass (just not in the sink – we don’t want to clog the pipes).
• Swish water through your mouth to rinse.

There’s a lot more you can do with sesame oil besides oil pulling. Here are some other sesame oil benefits:

Bed time gum massage:

Ayurveda recommends massaging the gums with sesame oil before going to bed to prevent or help receding gums. For a quick night time boost to your oral health, you could pour a little oil onto the bristles of an electric toothbrush and then massage around your gums and over the surface of your teeth. For maximum benefit don’t rinse afterwards, just leave the oil residue in your mouth to work while you rest. It’s not unpleasant and makes your mouth feel very clean.
Sesame oil works as a great natural lip salve too, dip your finger into a small amount and rub it gently into your lips morning and night to protect them from chapping.
While the oil’s out why not spend a couple more minutes really looking after yourself?

The sesame oil de-stress routine:

To ease anxiety and improve sleep pour a little oil into the palm of your hand and massage into your forehead and temples. Rubbing warm sesame oil into the area between your eyebrows in slow gentle circles is particularly good for calming your mind and improving the quality of sleep.
Finally use a little more oil and massage it into your feet. Work up and down the instep to release tension from your spine, and across the soles of your feet to relax tension and help you feel grounded as you settle down to rest.
If you’re worried about getting oil on your bed linen you could sleep with cotton socks on which will also help keep your feet warm and draw tension from your head down into your lower body.
Now it’s your turn.
Try it out and let us know what you think!

Drew Canole

Sources:
http://www.oilpulling.com/
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-4896/The-Single-Most-Effective-Ayurvedic-Practice-for-Your-Mouth.html
http://thehealthylivinglounge.com/2009/05/25/how-to-get-shiny-teeth-and-healthy-gums-with-oil-pulling/


Original post here: http://fitlife.tv/what-is-oil-pulling/

Debunking the Hybrid Myth

At the Seed Savers Exchange Conference this summer, Dr. John Navazio ‘s talk, “Debunking the Hybrid Myth,” laid out the hybrid vs. open-pollinated argument.  Here’s a peek at John’s speech, the whole speech is available here.  Also, check out Dr. Navazio’s new book, The Organic Seed Grower, due out in December.

Dr. Navazio teaches a class at Seed Savers Exchange on how to maintain robust varieties.

Why are hybrids favored?

• Once the parental inbreds are fixed it is easy to make the hybrids year after year.  You have two parental types and you cross them.
• You can maintain those two homogeneous, very uniform parental types, and every time you want to make some new hybrid seed just plant it out in the field, detassle one, and let the other one make pollen.  They’ve been inbred so much they’re very easy to maintain, unlike OP’s that have all that variation. You’re seed savers, you’ve seen it, right?  Once you’ve inbred them you’ve basically made it so genetically narrow that you’ll see that the variation is gone.  Two uniform parents make a uniform hybrid.
• Companies liked it because hybrids allowed instant proprietary ownership. If you maintained your own inbreds and didn’t give it to anybody else you were the only one that could make that ‘Copper Cross’ hybrid and sell it.  Whereas, previously, if you were Ferry Morse and released ‘Detroit Dark Red’ in 1902, within three years every home garden, farmer, and seed company in America had ‘Detroit Dark Red.’ Owners of seed companies loved this little trick, this little wizardry, and the breeders liked it because of the stacking of traits it is actually easier to breed hybrids.

What are the disadvantages of hybrids?

• Inbred lines are genetically narrow and have less adaptation over time than many OP’s.  That’s why so many of them died from inbreeding depression.  You reveal these deleterious traits and narrow their genetic base so much that they’re not adapting and evolving like our older varieties were at the hands of the humans who kept them.  In fact, in studies of inbred lines they found that the best inbred lines tend to have less of McClintock’s transposable elements which meant they stayed stable much easier and are the reason the companies loved them so much.   It’s anti-evolutionary.
• Hybrids are weaklings.  When you grow inbred seed, and I worked at a company where I grew inbred seed, you have to pour on the chemicals, use more water, more fertility, you really do have to baby them.  They are prima donnas.
• F1’s focus is often not on the best traits.  They’re really focused on the traits that are good for the centralized systems, where we do high input agriculture.  It’s the wedding of modern reductionist science and high input, high output.  That’s not the way Mother Nature normally works.  Vandana Shiva talks about how the focus of science has been reductionist, and it’s all about how can we figure out the input to get exactly what we need to get the right output.  At that point you are taking a lot of nature out of the system and the new variation that gives us all of the diversity that we honor so much here today just doesn’t show up as much.
• When you save seed from the hybrids, they don’t breed true, and when varieties are dropped they are gone!  You don’t save seed from hybrids, although there’s always an exception to the rule.
• Seed growing has become very centralized and very specialized.  A hundred years ago all farmers had knowledge of how to grow seed for most of their top line crops.  If you want to talk about loss of diversity, we have lost the people who know how to grow seed.  This is as tragic as losing the genetic variation itself.

What are the advantages of open-pollinated varieties?  

• They carry variability, and this results in genetic resilience.
• OP varieties can be bred to be tough in all stages.  We can select for that in all stages.  You can do that with hybrids too, but it’s easier if you have that built in resilience.
• They can be very regionally adapted and continue or always will be adapting year in and year out.  We need things like that right now, we’re going through this climate chaos, and so is everyone that I speak to all over the country.
• When you save seed they do breed true, if you followed your isolation, of course.
• Varieties are not lost due to a business decision.  Many of the farmers I work with actually went back to OPs’ because they were sick and tired of seed companies dropping hybrid varieties that they’d actually come to know and love and learn to cater their system too.  All of the sudden it is gone one day.

What are the disadvantages of OP’s?  

• They are genetically variable, and not always consistent. I don’t know if any of you get frustrated on the garden scale of not getting as much uniformity as perhaps you would like – some cabbage plants don’t really make a head or something like that.  But we can also take advantage of this if we do our selection and upkeep, and learn how to foster that adaptation.
• They are harder to maintain.  I can attest to that having bred both hybrid and OP’s.  It’s much harder to breed something that’s genetically resilient, while keeping in enough variability to keep it strong, and enough selection to make it uniform.  It’s a real paradox, how will I get a uniform enough variety but keep the variability?
• How do seed companies keep varieties exclusive?  If we’re just growing OP’s anyone can go and grow it.   That’s a biggie. And the question that I ask all the seed growers I work with is, “What is the incentive for you to proceed if there is no business incentive?”

Original post here : http://blog.seedsavers.org/debunking-the-hybrid-myth/

How to Grow Apple Seeds

So many children and adults alike have been intrigued by the stories of Johnny Appleseed and his way of planting apple seeds every where he went! With a little knowledge and some patience, apple seeds can be planted to grow into nice trees! Unfortunately, this will only work in areas that get freezing temperatures in the winter. This is a great project to start with children, and they can grow together.

How to :

    step 1: Pick an apple that you like and save the seeds. Place them in a damp paper towel and then fold it into quarters. Place the towel into a plastic bag into the refrigerator. After at least 6 weeks they should start to sprout. Only about 30% of the seeds will germinate so plant enough!

    step 2: Now plant the sprouts into small containers filled with potting soil. Keep the soil moist and in a sunny window


      step 3: When the plant is large enough, plant it outside when it can get about 12 hours of sunlight per day. It will need good ventilation and full sunshine. Don't worry about the cold weather as apple trees need the cold to produce fruit.

    step 4: Take good care of the tree while it is young. Fertilize and prune at the appropriate times. You local garden center should have plenty of information.

    step 5: After a few years, you should be picking apples. Even if they are not the most beautiful, they should be delicious for many things like fresh apple pie or even cider.

Original article : How to Grow Apple Seeds | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2135774_grow-apple-seeds.html#ixzz2HOZ9ybe0

Creating a Blogger Static Home Page

by Don James

Seems like there's always an unusual case where you want to create a Blogger blog with a static home page instead of the reverse order blog posts instead. I see this question quite often in the forums and support pages of other sites. Though this isn't a typical configuration for Blogger, the recent changes in the new layout editor have made this easier than ever without having to spend time editing the template code as you had in the past.

Add the Static Home Page

The first step is to simply create a static page in Blogger called something like 'Home Page' from the Blogger Pages menu item. Don't call it 'Home' yet because we're going to alter the home link later. When you click on the 'Pages' left menu item in the Blogger editor main menu you'll see that there is already a 'Home' link on the screen. Ignore that for now--just go up to the 'New Page' drop down box and select the 'Blank page' option:

You'll now be in the Page editor which looks a lot like the Blogger Post editor. At the top enter a page name such as 'Home Page' or 'Main Page' for now and some default text - we'll alter it later. Just go ahead and press 'Publish':

You should now see two pages in your list; 'Home' and 'Home Page' like so:

Now that you've created a static page, the next steps are are a bit tricky since you need to make sure your static page becomes 'Home' and the old Home link is hidden especially if you want to use menus.

Redirecting the Blogger Home Page to a Static Page

The great thing about the new Blogger template is that you can redirect pages to other pages now in the 'Settings' menu. Oddly, it is buried deep within the Blogger settings under 'Search Preferences':

Go ahead and choose the 'Edit' text link just to the right of the 'Custom Redirect' item. Now, this is a very critical step - be sure to enter the following text into the From: and To: boxes in the Redirect dialog:

In the From: box enter only a forward slash - "/". In the To: box enter the exact page name - in our case it was "/p/home-page.html". All Blogger static pages have a /p in front of the URL. You can see that the html name was the page title we used, so if you used something else for your title like 'Main Page' then the html would be /p/main-page.html.

Go ahead and press the little 'Save' text link and then the 'Save changes' button highlighted in the image above. What's now going to happen is that your main URL will redirect to the static page you've created. Go ahead and try to access your blog now - you should go directly to the new static page from the main URL.

All is good, right?? Well, not quite. If you want to enable visible tabs for Pages on your template the problem is going to be that you'll have two menu items called 'Home' and 'Home Page' on the tab bar both redirecting to your static page.  However, if you don't care to add Pages as tabs (they're not enabled by default) - you can stop at this point. Your static home page is ready to go!

Enabling Tabs for a Static Blogger Homepage

The very last step is to hide the original Home page link and add a page link to your blog pages so that the visible tabs work correctly. First, enable tabs from the Pages menu:

Be sure to press 'Save arrangement' in the upper right of the screen (not seen here)!  When you go to your home page you should now see the tab bar across the top of your blog. However, now when you click on either Home or Home Page you're going directly to your new static page. What you have to do at this point is hide the original 'Home' Page using the Layout editor. Open the Layout using the editor from the Blogger main menu:

Choose the 'Edit' text link in the Pages item within the layout. This is going to allow you to hide particular pages. Once you open the Pages layout editor you'll notice that you can hide certain pages:

Be sure to un-select the check box right next to the 'Home' page to make sure it stays hidden. Press 'Save' to hide that particular tab.

The final step is to add another Page that links to the blog posts directly. This isn't something you have to do - your blog posts can still show on the right sidebar in the layout. However, if you do want to get back to the main blogging page that has the last posts together, you'll need to add a link back to them. Once we changed the Home page link to the static page there's no longer any links to the main Posts page.

Go back into the main Blogger Page menu to add your link back as a menu tab. The first thing you'll notice is that the old Home page is now Hidden:

The key final step here is that you will be creating a 'Web Address' page instead of an actual Page. Create a new web address page called something like 'My Blog' to be your link to the Posts like this:

The link you need to enter is simply your full main, blog page URL (in my example page it is http://statichomepage.blogspot.com) with the addition of '/index.html' added to the end of it like this:

You're done!! If you look at your blog now, you'll see the top tab bar now has a Home link and a My Blog linked correctly to the right pages. I've created a sample site to show you the final outcome. Just click on the picture here to see it. Enjoy!!!

UPDATE (3 weeks later): Please take a look at my more recent post onHow Google indexes a Blogger Static Home Page

original article here : http://www.bloggertipspro.com/2012/06/creating-blogger-static-home-page.html

How to Build an Aeroponic System

http://growtest.org/

Hydroponics: Aeroponics System | Step by Step

http://growtest.org/

Urban Farm Tour with Will Allen

http://growtest.org/

Chinese Plant Compound Wipes out Cancer in 40 Days, Says New Research

  A little-known plant with a truly bizarre name is now making headlines as a cancer killer, with the compound of the plant vanishing tumors in mice with pancreatic cancer. Known as the ‘thunder god vine’ or lei gong teng, the Chinese plant is actually integrated into Chinese medicine and has been used for ages in remedying a number of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis.

  According to the new research out of the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center, the thunder god plant compound led to no signs of tumors after a 40 day period — even after discontinuing the treatment. Published in the journal Science Translational Medicine and funded by the National Institutes of Health, even the scientists working on the project were stunned by the anti-cancer properties of the compound. Known to contain something known as triptolide, which has been identified as a cancer fighter in previous research, it is thought to be the key component that may be responsible for the anti-tumor capabilities.

  Study leader and vice chairman of research at the Cancer Center explained to Bloomberg how he was blown away by the effects of the simple plant:
  “This drug is just unbelievably potent in killing tumor cells,”
he said.
  And just like with numerous other powerful substances like turmeric and ginger, mainstream science is still slowly confirming what many traditional practitioners have known for their entire lives. This is, of course, due to the fact that there is simply no money for major corporations in researching the healing powers of natural herbs and compounds such as the compound found in the thunder god vine. Turmeric and ginger, for example, have been found to be amazing anti-cancer substances that are virtually free compared to expensive and dangerous cancer drugs.

  Nevertheless, the Big Pharma sponsored corporate scientists have managed to ignore these spices as much as possible. In fact, they have even been caught time and time again faking thousands of studies to fraudulently demonstrate the supposed value of pharmaceutical drugs pushed by major pharma juggernauts — many of which are later forced to pay millions in fines which only slightly stack up against their billions in profits.

 Profits that are threatened by the many real studies that were performed by scientists examining the rejeuvenating power of cheap ingredients like turmeric, which has been found by peer-reviewed research available on PubMed to positively influence over 590 conditions.

  While it is great news that this study is bringing the beneficial effects of inexpensive and near-free plant compounds to light, the bad news is that the individuals responsible for the research are actually looking to create a pharmaceutical drug from the essential component triptolide. A drug that will seek FDA approval and ultimately be patented, nutritionally ruined, and sold for exorbitant amounts of cash. Instead, just get your hands on some thunder god vine for yourself.

Original article: http://naturalsociety.com/chinese-plant-compound-cancer-research/#ixzz2H8sgIE54