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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >I agree. Have you ever read any Eliot Coleman gardening books, His
> rotation suggestions make your head spin in a home garden. Just about
> impossible.
> 

I' ve read Elliot Coleman's books and a good number of others.  

Still to this day on seed packets is the instruction to plant this or that 
vegetable X" apart in rows Y" apart.  For many decades now gardeners have 
realized that planting  things in long skinny rows in the hand tended 
vegetable 
garden is an inefficient use of both space an effort.   Yet the instructions 
for 
rows persists.

It is thought, and I think, that the notion of rows of vegetables came from a 
time in our history when hand tended vegetable gardens became rare and 
mechanically tended fields were the norm.  I'm talking about Jethro Tull and 
1700's, 
it was only with the advent of horse drawn farming machinery that fields of 
vegetables were arranged in rows.

So when hand tended vegetables were again in voque, or were the necessity, 
people pitched about for an example and looked at commercial mechanically 
tended 
fields and made miniature versions fo that in their gardens.

Like that, after a lifetime of digging (incidental pun) in garden info, I'm 
conviced that much of what gets passed down to us from "experts" of of the 
same 
sort.  The shadow of Monsanto and ConAgra are much larger than we immagine.

And it's easy to see how wrong headed information gets started and 
perpetuated.  :I was at an organic conference of some sort a few years ago 
where the 
topic of one workshop was tomato diseases.  One participant suggested that in 
order to thwart the viral diseases on wooden tomato stakes, the gardener 
could 
rig a barrel of chlorine bleach solution and dip the stakes in that.  There 
was 
an immediate rending of clothes and heaping of ashes ..... chlorine bleach!! 
...(moan) ... don't you know that produces  cancer causing dioxins!!!??  
Actually it doesn't.  There was much in the news at the time about dioxins 
being 
produced by the use of chlorine beach in paper mills.  But the mills do so at 
high temps and pressures.  The Clorox you use to disinfect garden implement 
cannot form dioxins.  Yet the myth persists to this day.

In the same workshop someone was talking about conditions in cold frames and 
green houses to allow spinach and lettuce to be grown all winter.  Again the 
rending and ashes and moaning.  "Research shows that in the low winter light 
these plants will accumulate *nitrates* in their leaves and you sure don't 
want 
to be eating any nitrates!!!!! "  The render and moaner did not know, or did 
not care to consider, that it's nitrites in food, not nitrates, that are to 
be 
avoided.  The winter spinach is perfectly safe.

Bits and pieces of gardening "info" gets started in the corpus of literature 
and takes on a life of its own.   Filtering it out is a task.

James   </HTML>