Jeff Hill – How to Have a Garden Take Care of Itself

Jeff Hill is an agronomist passionate about nature and animals.

Living mulches can be of tremendous help if you want your garden to take care of itself.

Living mulches work because they take nutrients and water away from the weeds. They also compete with weed for sunlight. Living mulches also occupy the soil that would otherwise be exploited by weeds. In the meantime, living mulches also add fresh roots to the soil, helping it build more organic matter.

In addition to weeds, living mulches compete with desired plants. You can avoid this competition by planning your garden strategically and choosing plants with various heights. This will allow your plants and the mulches to get water, nutrients, and sunlight without having to compete with each other. Maintaining a buffer between vegetables and mulches can further help avoid competition.

There are three categories of living mulches. They are green manures, groundcovers, and intercrops. Green manures enhance the soil with nutrients and organic matter. They also create a diverse and rich habitat for soil organisms, which leads to increased diversity of garden life. As their name suggests, groundcovers are low-growing plants that form a cover on the soil. They require almost no maintenance. Unfortunately, a lot of garden centers sell invasive plants as groundcovers. Make sure to check with a local extension service before buying any groundcover plants to keep your garden safe.

Intercrops are the crops that grow in close proximity to other plants. Instead of planting vegetables in separate blocks, you can plant them close to each other to increase the diversity and productivity of your garden. Seek help from certified agriculture experts like Jeff Hill if you need a professional opinion about your garden.

Jeff Hill – Canning and Drying Foods for Winter Consumption

Jeff Hill is a plant science expert who focused on plant health and agronomy during his studies in college.

You may be afraid of canning foods at home because it seems dangerous. If you follow step-by-step instructions for canning fruits and vegetables, your sauces, jams, pickles and tomatoes will be just fine. You can always tell if a jar was properly sterilized by looking at the color of the canned food or the lid of the jar. A bowed or rounded on top jar points to botulism. A lid that doesn’t pop when you open a jar indicates that the jar was not sealed properly. If the liquid has a strange color that looks brown or black, it means that something went wrong. If the food looks slimy or moldy, you should throw it in the garbage.

Canning offers a number of benefits compared to freezing. First, you do not need a freezer for food when it’s canned. Second, some foods, such as pickles and peaches, taste better when canned.

Canning is more complicated compared to freezing and drying. It also preserves the least amount of nutrients in food. In contrast, dried foods are great sources of nutrients and energy. You do dry your foods the old-fashioned way: by hanging them in a dry place and letting them dry or by using a dehydrator or an oven. Just like with freezing, blanching vegetables before you start the preservation process helps them keep their nutritional value. Slicing or dicing produce into pieces helps it dry faster and makes the process easier.

Agriculture experts like Jeff Hill know about the importance of strictly following the rules. Use a screen when drying food outdoors. Cover the produce with a cloth to safeguard it from insects. Once the food dries, keep it in the refrigerator or in a dark cold place.

Jeff Hill – What You Need to Know about Cover Crops

Jeff Hill has an Associate’s Degree in agriculture business and a Bachelor’s Degree in Plant Science.

Cover crops are the crops that protect and enrich the soil. They are probably some of the hardest-working plants on the planet. While they rarely yield immediate tangible or edible benefits such as tomatoes or cucumbers, they do suppress weeds, prevent erosion, increase microorganisms, stabilize nutrients, help control pests and allow the soil to stay productive. In addition to this, cover crops require minimal care and are very easy to plant. They also grow well in any part of the United States.

Jeff Hill

There are three steps to increasing the productivity of your garden or yard with cover crops.

Planting

Planting cover crops is as easy as reseeding a bare patch on a lawn. Prepare the soil gently with a rake, put the seeds in and rake them in. Raking allows the seeds to have a good contact with the soil and protects them from birds. For the cover crops to grow, you need to plant them at least a month before rigid frosts. Cereal rye can be planted right before a frost and is the only exception from the rule.

Care

Cover crops require minimal maintenance. Mowing keeps them manageable and doesn’t allow them to compete with vegetables and flowers. You also need to water cover crops during the droughts.

Killing

You must kill the cover crops before their growth gets out of control. Agriculture experts like Jeff Hill learn in school that the best time to kill cover crops is when they start having seed heads.

Jeff Hill – How to Add Fall Colors to Your Garden

Jeff Hill is an agronomist with a unique experience who can help growers with plant selection, chemicals, and water.

Making your garden and farm look colorful and bright in the fall is very easy. In many states, September is one of the most beautiful months of the year. Gold, red and orange colors are starting to appear while most plants are still in bloom. There are several tips you can follow to design a garden that will be beautiful in the fall.

Add a few trees to your garden or yard that will stand out in the fall simply because of their color. Plant them strategically so that their colors are brightened and complimented by the colors of surrounding plants. A color may be set off by a background of green plants or it can be blended with neighboring crops and trees.

Do not plant too many mums. Many other flowers are beautiful in the fall, too. You can also use pumpkins to add bright orange.

There are many disease-resistant apples that look and taste great in the fall. Fruits such as the American persimmon do look and taste great after they have experienced some frost.

Fall is a great time to visit public gardens, arboretums, and parks to get some new ideas about what you can do with your own garden. You can see what is possible to do with a garden by noticing plants that grow well in your area in the cold months. If you are located on the East Coast, you can travel to Pennsylvania to Rodale Institute Experimental Farm. On the West Coast, where Jeff Hill lives, you can visit Earthbound Farms. You can also check the website of your state’s organic farming and gardening association to find gardens and farm that are located close to you.

 

Jeff Hill – An Introduction to Soil Biology

Jeff Hill is a professional agronomist passionate about biology and nature.

Most of the living soil is invisible to a naked human eye. However, you can see relatively big living organisms such as earthworms and spiders. The soil ecosystem is extremely interconnected. This is why the living soil visible to the human eye can give you a great indication about the much greater number of living organisms that you can’t see without a microscope. This is why a simple count of the number of ants, spiders, worms and termites in a handful of soil can tell you how well your soil is doing.

It is better to have such counts when soil organisms are at the peak of their activities. This happens when the soil is in the perfect condition: not too dry, not too wet, not too cold, not too hot. Mid-spring and mid-fall are great times for such measurements and counts. Dig a shovel of soil. Drop it on a white material to make counting easy. A piece of poster board or a white sheet of paper would work great for this task. Break the soil apart and carefully inspect it. Count the number of different living creatures that you will encounter. Termites and spiders usually move very fast, so you need to count quickly.

You don’t need to know the names of all the species that you encounter. It suffices to count the number of different types. Generally speaking, a soil is healthy when you can see three or more representatives of three or more types of soil organisms within two to four minutes, says Jeff Hill.

Jeff Hill – The Importance of Soil Aggregation

Jeff Hill says that with enough experience you can tell a good soil by feeling it in your hands. It will be soft, spongy and crumbly like a cookie. They are also stable under pressure.

These crumbs of soil are called aggregates. The influence of a proper soil aggregation is crucial to the health of a soil. Enhancements of soil aggregation have a similar effect to the improvements of the organic matter of your soil.

Just like you would do with other soil health indicators, you can estimate the condition of the aggregates in your soil when the soil is a little bit wet. Take a few handfuls of soil from the top six to ten inches.

Gently break the soil with your fingers and see what kinds of pieces you get at the end. Good soil would break into brownie-like round crumbs. Take these same aggregates and apply some pressure to them with your fingers. Do they break easily? Wet them a little bit with water and try again.

A healthy soil would break not into large blocks, but into small round pieces. The best aggregates can hold pressure and retain their shape under it.

When a lot of pressure is applied, they would break apart easily. Learn how a well-aggregated soil looks and feels like and you’ll be able to quickly identify soil conditions any time you want to do so. If your soil is building in a healthy way, you would have more and more of this brownie-like crumb structure with every year, shares Jeff Hill.

Jeff Hill – Ecosystems and Their Needs

Jeff Hill is a professional agriculture consultant. He knows that the variety of organisms has a variety of needs. You would feed a human bodybuilder champion and your cat the same food. A shark and an owl do not live in the same habitat. The more complex a garden or a farm, the more likely you are to deal with a similar extensive variety of needs.

However, this complexity doesn’t mean that maintaining a healthy garden or a farm is complicated. In fact, complex ecosystems are often easier to manage because they take care of a lot of things on their own.

By meeting this variety of needs the organic soil matter becomes more diverse. This means that the functions of different elements of the soil ecosystem are repeated in a diverse number of ways by a diverse set of different organisms.

A big city of people is a great analogy. Every big city has a number of good auto repair mechanics. If you can’t get to one of them, you can visit someone else. If you have an exotic car, you can find several mechanics that specialize in your car brand. The same principles of variety and diversity apply to a healthy soil ecosystem.

Taking care of such an ecosystem means meeting the four key needs of any living creature. These needs are air, food, water and shelter. If you can provide those, then the ecosystem will take care of everything else.

This is the template that you can use to nurture the living component of the soil. While different soils do require slightly different ways in nurturing them, the basics do stay the same, says Jeff Hill.

Jeff Hill – Taking Entrepreneurship to the Next Level

Jeff Hill, the owner of ATP Agriculture and Irrigation Consultants, knows that launching a new business can be simultaneously inspiring and anxiety-riddled. It’s a huge step to take that requires a great deal of thought, effort, and resources, and he recommends that prospective entrepreneurs keep the following tips and tricks in mind to get started on the right foot.

• Launch a business that you’re going to enjoy thinking and talking about. Especially in the beginning, your work will entirely consume your life, and it’s important that you have a great deal of passion to work through the burnout and exhaustion.
• Use social media to your advantage. This is an incredible age where the smallest business owners can spread the message with a minimal amount of knowledge and effort. A simple website will help people find you and get a general feel for what you have to offer.
• Approach every interaction as a potential sale. Have an elevator speech prepared so that you’re always ready to explain exactly what it is you do and why potential clients should choose your services.
• Develop deeper relationships based on trust and respect with your customers. Getting to know potential clients in a more profound manner rather than conducting a simple transaction will build the bedrock of your business. By treating your clients with integrity, you are developing relationships that have the potential to continue far into the future.

Jeff Hill is passionate about working with farmers to create sustainable solutions to promote healthy, thriving businesses.

Sources: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/200730

Jeff Hill -Tips for Promoting Plant Growth in Your Garden

Jeff Hill, an entrepreneur dedicated to helping farmers implement successful irrigations systems, knows that the appreciation and understanding of healthy crops begin in your own garden. Spending this time outside can be relaxing and reinvigorating, and with the following tips and tricks, your garden can be a vibrant picture of health of beauty.

Jeff Hill

When you are initially planning your garden, choose high-quality seeds and plants. Take a close look at the root systems of the plants you purchase to ensure that they are healthy and abundant. This will help you avoid introducing diseases into your garden that have the potential to cause a great deal of damage.

Know what sort of soil you’re working with. Without any information regarding your soil’s nutrient levels, applying fertilizer may cause problems in the soil balance by introducing too much of a nutrient you already have or not enough of something your soil needs.

Be careful when you water. Watering in the morning rather than during the heat of the day will prevent evaporation, and try to avoid wetting the leaves and foliage because extra moisture can introduce new diseases that may have been entirely preventable.

Buy plants that are suited to the climate where you live. Just because a plant is beautiful does not mean that it’s going to grow well in your garden. Choose native plants that are adjusted to the climate to save on your water bill.

Jeff Hill loves spending time outside with his family. He’s based in Clovis, California.

Sources:
http://www.finegardening.com/10-ways-keep-your-garden-healthy

Jeff Hill – Agronomics Explained

Agronomics, or agricultural economics, specifically focuses on optimizing and streamlining the methods by which food is produced and distributed. Jeff Hill, who is a licensed agriculture irrigation specialist and crop advisor shares how incredibly important it is that farmers, and quite simply, the general public, understand these basic concepts.

Agricultural economics is always focusing on improving the sustainability of land use. By implementing tools for optimizing land management, erosion prevention, pest management, and more, agronomists focus on a great deal of complex relationships that must work in harmony to create a healthy, balanced, and successful operation.

Jeff Hill

Agronomics also focuses on the real-life implications of decision-making and risks that happen at the farm level. With decreasing production levels, specialists aim to address and innovate these decisions to ensure that farmers are making the best choices regarding methodology, technology, and policies.

While agricultural economics have historically focused more on smaller-scale concepts, recently a priority has been placed on the over-arching concept of food consumption by analyzing the varied effects of pricing and the relationship between quality and consumer choices. Being a psychologically-driven area of the field, agronomists strive to understand the intricate relationship between what is being sold and what actually makes it home into the refrigerator. This also functions in the context of implementing new ways to bring more food to impoverished areas of the world where these systems can be interrupted or even entirely dysfunctional.

Jeff Hill is based in Clovis, California. He always looks forward to meeting new clients.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_economics