Homestead mailing list

["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

I think a lot of it has to do with esthetics.  Nice rows are pretty.  It has 
nothing to do with reality but rather the backyard gardener who spends lots 
at the local nursery or garden section of the Big Box.  They aren't in it to 
*grow* food, they are in it for a little hobby, something to show the 
neighbors (hey, look at the tomato I grew, why it's the biggest, most 
beautiful tomato in the world) and then the neighbor comes over and they 
show off the *perfect* garden.

Plus, as you said about the conferences and workshops.  They don't put those 
on, in the majority, to education people.  They put them on to make money! 
All they are is one more version of p.s.  Get the sheople out there to be 
better consumers.

Lynda

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com>
> 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>
> _______________________________________________
> Homestead list and subscription:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/homestead
> Change your homestead list member options:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/options/homestead/lurine%40softcom.net
> View the archives at:
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/homestead