Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pat Meadows <pat@meadows.pair.com>]

On Thu, 11 May 2006 13:18:39 -0600, you wrote:

>Not to rain on anyone's parade, but........
>
>
>Before allot of this can happen, home building techniques and laws will have 
>to change, and as long as some people have the money, that is not going to 
>happen.
>
>In many places, the available yard is less than 50 sq ft, and if it is, 
>available, the amount of available sun is low.
>
We have a little over 1/3 of an acre - which is really more
than we can handle in the way of a garden (health problems).
Much more.  (Although we grow a lot of food!)

We're on the edge of a small town in a very rural area.  We
are within the town limits.  We are not allowed to garden in
old tires; and when a neighbor complained, were forced to
dismantle last year's garden in early July.  Bad timing.

The neighbor complained because she didn't like the
hoophouse we built.  The hoophouse is fine, it's in
accordance with the zoning regulations.  We had checked on
that before building it, of course.

But once the neighbor complained and the zoning board people
came to our house, of course they saw that we were gardening
in tires.  And we had to remove them.  We could have fought
it as the regulation says that we cannot 'accumulate' tires,
and we were not 'accumulating' them but gardening in them.
But we both have health problems and just couldn't face a
knock-down, drag-out fight about it.  So we removed them. We
had just about decided that most of our gardening needs to
be in containers anyway:  I wasn't managing to keep up with
the weeding around the tires.  I can manage containers (with
help).  We'll put a couple of tomatoes in the ground, my
herb garden is planted in the ground; for the rest, this
year it will be a container garden.

What I would *like* to do would be to have lots of old
toilets in the front yard, and claim that they are my form
of artistic expression.  :)  But I can't bring myself to do
it; after all, we live here.  

Also, it would guarantee complaints that one of our dogs
barks too much (he barks; he's a rough collie; collies are
barkers and there's no real way to train them out of it). We
NEVER let him bark more than the amount of time it takes us
to get to the back door and call him in.  And when we're not
home, we leave the dogs in the house.  But he does bark;
this is indisputable.  So we don't want to invite complaints
about him. 

Pat
-- 
Gardening in northern Pennsylvania.  

Eat local food, change the world for the better!