Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Liz <liz@allslash.org>]

At 02:58 PM 11/30/2007, you wrote:

> Thanks, I'll answer that.
> <snip>
> It was an immigrant neighborhood, Italian,
> Greek, and so forth. And they all grew pretty much the same way with little
> money invested and even less work. Their own garden was only dug up at the
> beginning but never afterward. They weren't obsessed with weeding. Her
> father manured it each year and kept permanent paths to walk on without
> compacting the growing areas. No neat rows, no chemicals, no tillers. And
> always, they cooked from the garden.


And I'll chime in to add that it took me exactly two years in a 
coastal area with very sandy soil to get a backyard garden prolific 
enough to provide most of the family's food.  We composted anything 
that didn't run away, covered the soil with ours and all the 
neighbors' newspapers to keep weeds from growing (and keep the soil 
moist), grew open-pollinated varieties that would take wider 
variations in growing conditions than most hybrids, and figured out 
100 new ways to prepare zucchini. My kids still talk about the 
incredible tomatoes we had. And I canned hundreds of jars of 
vegetables to keep us going throughout the winters, in addition to 
what we ate fresh. We had a fairly large city lot, maybe twice the 
size they typically are nowadays, but that was all. It was a lot of 
hard work at the beginning, but after that, things pretty much kept 
themselves going. And the only help I had was three kids from 6 to 10 
years old.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com