Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Gwen Giffen" <ggiffen@1st.net>]

> I've been seeing Jerry Baker - "America's Master Gardener" - lately on PBS 
> and wondering where he gets some of his stuff. He makes growing sooo 
> complicated I'd give up if I had to do all that. He preaches compost and 
> mulching, but he wants everybody spraying soil and plants with "tonic" 
> made of Listerine, tobacco juice, Epson Salt, beer, and God knows what 
> else. And he just told us how to use Roundup. Do people do all this stuff 
> in home gardens?
>
> Beer to feed the bacteria and Listerine to kill them?

I don't watch TV enough to see any of those programs. Some gardener guy was 
demonstrating expensive irrigation systems that he called "inexpensive" on 
Good Morning America last week - a program I watch every 2-3 weeks. I just 
use a hand-held garden hose. The only things I've used Round Up on are 
poison ivy, burdock and Japanese knotweed. Since being educated about 
Monsanto's legal practices, I will probably never buy Round Up, or buy seeds 
at Walmart again however, and have had my ears and eyes open for 
alternatives. Right now, I'm trying to shade the knotweed out with 
blackberry canes, and it seems to be working as well as the Round Up (with a 
little elbow grease). I pulled the knotweed and threw it onto a pile I am 
saving for the last area of eradication - the septic run-off area. I sprayed 
newly cleared areas with Round Up and covered with black plastic for a few 
months. I planted, and the birds planted blackberry canes, and I pruned them 
so they were nice and bushy. In one spot, I made a growing knotweed patch 
the site for an ongoing burn pile, and that is also working nicely in 
eradicating it.

In gardening, we do a little bit of everything. When I was 11 or 12, I 
discovered magazine subscriptions like "Cricket." One day my dad handed me 
the Publisher's Clearing House letter to play with the stamps (and other 
such mail he didn't want to mess with). I filled those things out and sent 
them in, but in MY name. One of the magazines I picked was Organic 
Gardening, mainly because I didn't know what "organic" was. With it, we got 
a free soil test kit. I was into scientific experiments, so when we got it, 
I tested some garden soil, and announced the results to my folks. They were 
amused. They skipped through the magazine - then a little, sort of thickish 
thing - and discovered the editor, Gene Logsdon, was someone they had been 
acquainted with in a little town we once lived in, Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

My dad was a spray can and chemical guy - especially with the beans and 
potatoes. My mother was an experiment with organic stuff gal. Since I was a 
girl, I learned mostly organic stuff, as my dad taught my brothers the 
spraying. We spent long hours snapping, freezing and canning, but never had 
as many quarts as either grandmother who did theirs single-handedly. (This 
amazed me always as a child. I felt nobody could have worked harder than 
us!)

As an adult, I'll have to admit that I keep a very small hobby garden; 
rarely put up food, and only if I'm in the mood for it. I buy stuff at the 
store. We'd like to do more, and have been experimenting with different 
ideas. My husband spends a lot more time in the garden than I do. We have 
shelves of canning jars and 2 working deep freezes in the basement. We use a 
lot of composted manure from our barns, and leftover hay on our gardens. The 
prolific slugs in the garden have had me stumped. They also make me realize 
that I've been fighting off parasites with my livestock for a very good 
reason. So we've tried a little poultry, but the poultry have made gardening 
impossible, as they also eat the things I plant. However, I doubt there is a 
slug or grub left in my garden. And we have more eggs than we know what to 
do with now, mostly laid in the outhouse-turned-garden-shed. (The chickens 
adopted it as a laying house). Next step is a fence around the garden, with 
controlled pasturing.

No fancy-schmancy garden show is going to talk about poultry and fencing. I 
get curious sometimes at those suburban ChemLawn sprawling well-pruned, 
rubber lined wood lots, and watch out of fascination at times. But I don't 
wanna live that way.

Oh, yes. My parents used to be on the Educational Television of Southeastern 
Ohio board (ETSEO), where they chose some of the programming for PBS, out of 
Athens. They were teachers, and my father was nominated sometime way back 
when. The board was a sort of private friendship entity over the years. I 
suppose you'd have to talk with someone on that kind of board, unless the 
show is programmed out of a higher programming entity, if you wanted a 
different program on instead. Is there someone doing a different program? It 
is just a thought. Does someone with livestock have a filming hobby, who 
could do one??? (If you included chickens, ducks and geese with gardening 
techniques, I'd be part of your audience!)

Gwen