Gardening should be added to the curriculum because it can improve children's literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills, it is claimed. Telegraph.co.uk By Graeme Paton, Education Editor Pupils should be encouraged to grow vegetables and tend flowerbeds because gardening boosts a child's development and improve standards in other subjects. Academics from the National Foundation for Educational Research surveyed 1,300 teachers and studied 10 schools to examine the impact of gardening on pupils.

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Planners want to make Baltimore healthier, more walkable The Baltimore Sun By Julie Scharper In a simple greenhouse fashioned from sheets of paint-spattered plastic, Larisa Bishop is learning to love vegetables. The Heritage High School freshman guides visitors past rows of fuschia- and yellow-stalked chard, curly kale and feathery carrot tops. She bends over a line of beets the size of tennis balls, explaining that she prefers these fresh ones to their canned counterparts. "I never used to eat my vegetables," said Larisa, 14. "They look pretty in the grocery store, but they don't taste like anything. The carrots are so much sweeter when they're just out of the ground. And the sugar snap peas are so sweet." The sweltering, loam-scented greenhouses on the grounds of Lake Clifton Park are now an anomaly in Baltimore. But officials hope that an overhaul of the city's zoning code, the first since Richard Nixon was in the White House, will nourish a bumper crop of urban farms.

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Over the last century, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers has saturated the Earth’s soils and waters with nitrogen. Now scientists are warning that we must move quickly to revolutionize agricultural systems and greatly reduce the amount of nitrogen we put into the planet's ecosystems. Yale, Environmental 360 by Fred Pearce A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an addiction. Call it the nitrogen fix. It is like a drug mainlined into the planet's ecosystems, suffusing every cell, every pore — including our own bodies.

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Sacramento Bee By KIM PALMER, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) MINNEAPOLIS -- It was a rainy Saturday - a perfect day for sleeping late or lingering over a latte. But graduate student Sarah Burridge of Minneapolis was in a farm field getting wet and dirty with a bunch of people she didn't know. They got a quick demonstration on the stirrup hoe, then got to work planting tomatoes and onions, and mulching paths using mown alfalfa. Burridge didn't get paid. She didn't even get much produce - just a few radishes. She spent the day as a farm hand for "fun," she said, after a Facebook friend told her about having a great experience volunteering at a farm near Washington, D.C. All across the country, similar groups of mostly young urbanites are gathering in "crop mobs"

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Why ecological evenness is as important as relative richness. Nature News Daniel Cressey A study suggesting that organic agriculture gives better pest control and larger plants than conventional farming is sure to reignite longstanding debates about the merits of organic versus conventional agriculture. It also highlights an often-neglected aspect of biodiversity. "Organic agriculture promotes more balanced communities of predators," says David Crowder, author of the new study published today in Nature1.

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