Lyndon Thomas Insurance
GET THE BENEFITS OF GARDENING WITHOUT THE SWEAT
Move Your Veggies Indoors!
Gardening is incredibly satisfying — but in the summer, you may wonder whether the fresh produce is worth suffering through the heat, the humidity, and a stiff back. If so, try moving your garden indoors! Inside, you can get the same mental and physical benefits without the sweat. Here are three creative ways to grow food indoors. Grow your lettuce hydroponically. Lettuce is one of the quickest and easiest crops to grow inside because it thrives in relatively low light. You can buy a lettuce-growing kit for less than $100 at Walmart or off Amazon and either start the sprouts from seed in a moist growing medium (environmental journalist Katherine
Gallagher recommends rockwool, lightweight clay aggregate, coconut fiber, or perlite) or purchase plant starts at your local nursery. Within a month, your lettuce leaves will be ready to eat! Plant peas or carrots under grow lights. Many people assume fruiting plants like peas and carrots are impossible to grow indoors. But with powerful grow lights, almost any plant can flourish! Try planting seeds or starts in pots and sunning them with fluorescent shop lights. The plants will take longer to mature than outdoors, but you’ll get there in the end. Other fruiting plants, like peppers and tomatoes, require hand pollination to thrive inside. Create a mushroom-growing compost bin. You only need six things to grow mushrooms: a wooden tray, compost, mushroom spawn, a heating pad, a thermometer, and a spray bottle. Fill the tray with compost and a pinch of spawn, keep the compost at a toasty 70 degrees F with the heating pad for three weeks, and moisten it with sprays of water regularly until mushrooms appear. Go to Better Homes & Gardens for an online guide, or purchase a mushroom kit or terrarium. The more time, patience, and creativity you put into your indoor garden, the more it will reward you. To dig deeper (pun intended), pick up a copy of “Indoor Kitchen Gardening: Turn Your Home Into a Year-Round Vegetable Garden” by Elizabeth Millard or check out The Provident Prepper’s “Indoor Gardening” playlist on YouTube.
DON’T GET SCAMMED! Tips for Recognizing a Scam Call
Perhaps you’ve heard the old line, “Why do criminals rob banks?” Answer: Because that’s where the money is. These days, it’s the dumb criminals who risk arrest by walking into a bank with a weapon. Smarter criminals don’t risk their lives and have a greater chance of getting away with it using the telephone and internet to rob people. Sadly, telephone scams are where the money is these days. Getting caught in a telephone scam is frightening, expensive, and embarrassing. Here are tips for recognizing scam calls. The caller pretends to know you or has some familiarity with a family member. My parents once received a call from a skilled scammer who convincingly claimed to be a grandson in trouble. Once they began asking personal questions that their true grandson would already know, the scammer was exposed. My father laughed at the guy until he hung up.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 3 ...
2
CA# 0D96309
1211 Maricopa Hwy, Ste 222, Ojai, CA 93023
www.LT-ins.com
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator