Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Folks, what we're up against here is the quick-fix mentality in this
country. Whatever the problem, just throw money at it and it's taken care
of. Whether you've got the blues or poor garden soil, just pop a pill or
pour something on it. Don't know what's for supper? Grab something on the
way home from work and pop in in the microwave. Got bugs dining on your
tomatoes? Buy a spray. Problem roses? Buy Miracle-Gro. 

These modern quick fixes come with a downside. Mess with the genes and you
can't even guess what unintended effects you may get. Farm in single file
tractor rows and you find you can get only a fraction of what your land
could produce in wide rows or beds - more like nature grows. Grow
monocultures and see what happens when the bugs find it. Soak your land in
ammonium nitrate and see how much more you have to pour on next year. Try
growing in soilless mediums and see how much you have to shell out for
pesticides and fungicides. Geez.

We advocate building up healthy soil over time, plus intelligent growing
practices to make best use of our time and labor. Very little in good
growing is really new. Most good practices have been developed and used
sometime, somewhere back in history, often for millennia. Watering methods
in many cultures have been downright ingenious and worked well. Compost is
positively ancient. Raised beds from centuries ago were discovered in Peru.
Extensive and brilliant growing systems have been discovered among ancient
Aztecs. Native Americans cultivated a wide range of crops and bred
varieties. 

Today we understand more about the mechanisms of soil biology, but the
science is still in its infancy. Mother Nature holds her secrets close. We
can imitate natural soil building and speed it up greatly by mixing the
natural ingredients in the right proportions, but we still can't bypass the
microbial processes that do the actual work. 

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not
television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only
those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about
it. 
   - Aldo Leopold in  Round River, 1933