Homestead mailing list

["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

Late one season I was harvesting the last of the tomatoes from some OP vines 
when I came across a neglected tomato that, alas, had been badly sunscaled, 
had blossom end rot, was insect bitten and more than half decayed.  Not 
willing to make the trip up to the compost bins for one tomato, I flung it 
toward the woods.  Being far gone to decay it did not make a very good 
missile and half of it landed at the garden fence, as luck would have it, on 
an area where I had dumped some excess wood ashes and limestone sand.  That 
is, it was very alkaline.  A tomato seed could not have happened on a worse 
happenstance: laying exposed to the winter weather on top of the worst 
nitrogen poor alkaline soil possible.

Next season the area became overgrown with early weeds and I did not weed it 
right away since I had no use for it.  The tomato seed had survived!  They 
germinated, grew above the weeds, and unexplained to this day, the few 
plants bore several dozen of the very best tomatoes I've ever grown all with 
no more work or regard from me but to fling a rotten tomato toward the 
woods.

Who doesn't have a gardening story similar to this?  Who hasn't found 
something growing volunteer somewhere on the farm against all odds that 
produced a respectable crop all with no effort whatever on the part of the 
gardener?  This summer it was some acorn squash.  In late summer I got 
around to scything down a patch of weeds so ghastly that even the goats 
avoided them and there growing out of the inhospitable sod  underneath a 
jungle of weeds was a rambling acorn squash vine with a dozen huge perfect 
squash growing on it:

http://www.geocities.com/nogomain/squash.jpg

Not only that but (and have you not had this happen) I've planted tomatoes 
and squashes on nearly perfect ground, weed-free, deeply composted, heavily 
mulched, lavishly tended ... and the vines have died producing nothing.

So, fellow homesteaders, what's the deal?  Is it just a 50/50 situation? 
Put the seeds into a well tended garden or just throw them out in the field 
and woods and they might grow and they might not with no particular 
advantage to the well composted garden.  Is all our talk and blather and 
gardening advice just so much dust in the wind?

And further more (now that I'm getting worked up) where do you people get 
off posting advice on tilling, mulching, composting, plant varieties and 
such!  "Contrary to the beliefs of some, there is no one-size-fits-all in 
any aspect of [gardening]."   After all, isn't that essentially what that 
Fukuoka fellow did (One Straw Revolution), just dropped by the WalMart one 
day on his way home and bought some packets of seed and threw them about on 
his place and lived off that.  The story goes something like that, earned 
his living off stuff that just happened to come up in the sod and ditches, 
or some such story.

----------------------------------

However back on earth from the cyberfantasy, every gardener here with any 
experience at all knows that 99.99% of the time, plants follow a predictable 
biology and while there are no guarantees of a harvest, gardening is more 
about stacking the odds in your favor.  If your garden is planted in its 
season, composted, mulched, tended, and your actions are guided by the 
biological principles you know are in play; you GREATLY increase your odds 
of a harvest.   Just because by rare happenstance you can leave some seeds 
lying about and once in a rare while they will grow unattended and produce 
food, you cannot rely in any way on this.  Throwing rotten tomatoes about 
your homestead in hopes that next year one of them will come up and produce 
tomatoes stacks the odds very greatly toward a tomato-less future.

And so it is with the anecdotes about the 93 year old who died with a pack 
of Camels in his shirt pocket or the 46 year old who suddenly dies of a rare 
cancer.  They are as germane to the discussion of the effect of attitude, 
exercise, and diet on health as my story of throwing away the tomato is 
germane to any profitable discussion on gardening.

The Aussie study that Marie forwards first said that the "vast majority" of 
people benefited from the exercise.  But notice that other than stating that 
the participants did not regularly exercise before the study, we do not know 
their histories.  For example when a wheezing middle aged man who has been a 
heavy smoker all his life asks what he can do to restore his lung capacity, 
what can you tell him?  First he must deal with the fact that he has caused 
permanent harm to himself from which he will NEVER completely recover.  Like 
that, people who abuse their endocrine systems through bad diet and lack of 
exercise have done permanent damage to themselves and twenty weeks of 
stationary bicycle three times a week sure enough is NOT going to reverse 
that damage.  Genes have nothing to do with it.

Marie asks:  "I wonder if severely obese individuals have always been with 
us, but used to stay at home because they couldn't get around???"   No, they 
haven't.  Not in the numbers we have now days, this is a fairly recent 
phenomenon.  Human genes have not changed in the past 25 years.   "Contrary 
to what some believe" [the phrase du jour, I guess] human biology does not 
vary so widely as some suppose.  Fat does not appear out of the ether.  A 
pound of human fat requires that the person consume at least 3500 calories 
more than they expend just to acquire it and something like 15 calories a 
day to maintain  each pound (basal metabolism which for fat is mainly just 
keeping it warm).  A person who ends up with a 8000 sq ft house but swears 
he only bought enough bricks to build a 1,800 square foot house but by the 
time he'd used all the bricks, there it was - the same as this person has no 
credibility, the 400 lb person who claims it was all just the medicine they 
were taking that made them gain weight has the same credibility.  The human 
flesh did not spontaneously generate out of thin air.

The phenomenon we are dealing with still is that the vast, vast majority of 
people who exercise (and more than the pitiful stationary bicycle in Marie's 
article) are healthy and stay healthy.  The vast majority of people do not 
smoke maintain good pulmonary health.  The vast majority of people who eat 
whole foods avoid devastating cancer.  Those practices are not a 50/50, they 
are overwhelming odds in the favor of the prudent.   On the other hand a 
large percentage of obese develop diabetes, a large percent of people who 
smoke get lung disease, a large percent of people who do not exercise get 
cancer and stroke.  Even this isn't 50/50, it's Russian roulette with four 
bullets in the revolver.

Now as we encounter people in our wanderings and we come across a large 
percent of people now of days with wrecked health and EVERY one of them says 
that it's genes, a rare disease, the effects of the medicine they are 
taking.  What are the odds that it was something that just blindsided them 
and they could do nothing about it and what are the odds they are using that 
for an excuse for the awful choices they've made in their lives?  At one 
time on a homesteading list, the constitutional health of the members one 
might expect to be more or less random, out of 20 regular posters 11 had at 
least three diseases each whose individual incidence was less than one 
person in 100,000.  Each of these individuals had a statistical likelihood 
of one in about 13 million of having those rare, rare diseases all in 
combination and yet here more than 50% of the regular participants had them. 
As an example, do any of you know 20,000 people even if you added all the 
members of all the email lists you are on?   That's the incidence rate of 
Myasthenia Gravis for all cases including those with mild symptoms and no 
symptoms at all, one in 20,000 and that's from its advocacy groups who have 
a vested interest in inflating the numbers.  I don't know 20,000 people 
either, no where near that many.  And yet I have encountered no less than 30 
people on various lists who are totally disabled because of MG.  What ARE 
the odds?  That's what I refer to as 'fashionable diseases'.  Because of the 
statistics, I just don't believe it.  It's a ploy to make obesity and 
inactivity not only acceptable but noble.  And it's just as likely to be 
true as throwing rotten tomatoes about is likely to get you a crop of 
tomatoes.

James