A few months ago, we shared the story and photos of a replanting event that took place at Portland’s Peninsula Park Rose Garden. Hundreds of volunteers replanted 3,000 roses in anticipation of the garden’s upcoming centennial celebration. Cascade Minerals was honored to help by donating nearly 2,000 pounds of our all-natural volcanic soil amendment to…
Category: Soil Health
It’s encouraging to see more and more people becoming interested in eating healthy, nutritious food that they grow themselves. Because good food begins with good soil, the time that you spend conditioning the soil in your garden now will pay off with plenty of delicious and healthy produce in the months ahead. We can’t all…
Whether you tend a vegetable garden, grow prize-winning blooms or cultivate containers, great soil is the place to start. As the saying goes, “For every dollar spent, 90-cents should be for the soil—and 10-cents for the plant!” Mike Darcy, host of KXL-FM’s “In the Garden” which airs Saturday mornings in Portland, Oregon, invited Cascade Minerals’…
The key to growing healthy, disease-resistant plants is to begin with healthy soil. How can you tell if your soil is balanced? Healthy soil… Looks, smells, and feels alive Is soft, moist, and crumbly Is darker in color Is easy to dig into Has a sweet and earthy aroma Is home to worms and other…
There is much to do to preserve and protect our planet, but there is also much to celebrate when it comes to sustainable foods, products and practices. Here are five things to celebrate—and to build upon: 1. CSAs, or community supported agriculture, are growing rapidly across the U.S. These are farms that regularly provide their…
Fruits and vegetables are all nutritionally alike, right? Wrong! When you read a nutrition label at the supermarket, you only get part of the story. Some scientists claim that the average supermarket vegetable has 5% to 40% fewer micronutrients (like magnesium, iron and calcium) than vegetables that were grown 50 years ago. Part of the…
Early this spring, we did a top-dressing application of Cascade Minerals on a test field of carrots in Madras, Oregon. We’ll be following these carrots through to yield, and you can watch some of the videos on our YouTube channel. By late March, our plants were well-established and it was time to do a “side-dressing.”…
We appreciate hearing stories from farmers and gardeners who have experienced firsthand the benefits of Cascade Minerals Remineralizing Soil Booster all-natural volcanic basalt soil amendment. One of those is Millennium Farms in Ridgefield, Washington. Millennium Farms specializes in heirloom plants, also known as “old-fashioned” plants because they are usually grown on a small scale using…
Spring has sprung—at least it appears that way at home and garden centers everywhere. Before going on a shopping spree (what gardener can resist?), prepare your soil for the busy months ahead. A little prep work now will ensure the health and vitality of your plants for months to come. The truth is, we demand…
It is important to feed the soil instead of just the plants. Chemically synthesized fertilizers do the opposite. They feed plants directly, without adding any healthy microorganisms back to the soil. The short term results are good. The long term consequences are bad. As beneficial living organisms die out, the soil becomes unbalanced and hard. Plants…
