Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Priceless.

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 12/18/2007 at 7:55 AM Douglas  Willhite wrote:

>Humorous and all too real!
>Doug
>
>Mom and dad could've done it
>MARGARET WENTE
>>From Saturday's Globe and Mail
>http://ago.mobile.globeandmail.com/generated/archive/RTGAM/html/20070720/ww
ente20.html
>
>My husband and I are typical urban homeowners - which is to say, at the
>mercy of our aging house. A while ago we got up one morning to discover a
>distinctly swampy odor emanating from our bathroom sink. I figure swampy
>odors are men's work, so I sent him down to the basement to take a look.
>Sure enough, our sewer had backed up.
>
>Our dads would have known what to do. We didn't. Instead, we panicked.
>Four or five thousand dollars later, we had new sewer pipes and a new
>cement floor in the basement. We also had a notion that we'd probably been
>hosed. What should it really cost to fix our plumbing problem? We didn't
>have a clue. Like most homeowners today, we are at the mercy of anyone
>with expertise. We're dumb bunny rabbits in the forest, easy marks for
>anyone who wants to eat us for lunch.
>
>Don't get me wrong. I married my husband for his congenial disposition and
>his shapely frontal lobes, not his skills with a hammer. Yet, I confess
>that deep down inside, I expect every man to be able to fix things, as our
>dads did, or at least to know how they ought to be fixed. My romantic
>fantasies generally do not include billionaires, athletes or handsome
>movie stars. I dream about Mike Holmes. I dream that he will one day show
>up in his tool belt at my door and say, "Hey, little missy, I hear you've
>got a leaky skylight."
>
>Is this sexist? I guess so. But men are worried about the loss of these
>skills, too.
>
>"We can't do one-quarter of the things our fathers can," one blogger says
>in a widely linked lament. Most younger men today, he notes, cannot
>operate a drill press, a band saw or an angle grinder. They're absolutely
>stuck when the air conditioner breaks down or the toilet backs up. They
>are also hopelessly at the mercy of more qualified personnel.
>
>My dad wasn't unusually handy, for his time. But he could build a radio
>from a Heath kit, sand down, varnish and repaint a wooden boat, rewire a
>light switch, fix a furnace and hang a door. When we added a second story
>to our little house, he and my mother did all the finishing work and
>painting themselves. (Only rich people hired painters in those days.)
>
>My father-in-law could bag a grouse and shoot and skin a deer. He was an
>exquisite woodworker, and made turned bowls and furniture. He once built a
>canoe. Both dads could make a fire in the rain and had a basic working
>knowledge of auto mechanics. Clogged toilets were nothing to them.
>
>In other words, our dads were able to function competently in the world
>they lived in. Their skills were crucial to the daily operation of the
>family unit.
>
>As we rely increasingly on cognitive skills to earn our living, our
>practical skills are dying off. When you can make more money manipulating
>symbols than you can manipulating tools, it's more efficient to call a
>plumber than to take apart the sink yourself. Still, an entire
>encyclopedia of common knowledge is being lost. As we become more and more
>affluent, we also become more and more helpless.
>
>The disappearance of practical skills isn't just a guy thing. Cooking has
>pretty well died off, too, if, by "cooking," you include the menu planning
>and food prep necessary to produce three squares a day for an entire
>family, with no microwave ovens and no cheating with takeout. Our moms
>weren't exactly gourmet cooks. But the meals were always on the table -
>meat, starch and vegetables, with the occasional homemade pie and cake,
>day in and day out. Few have the time or inclination for this type of work
>any more, unless they're getting paid for it. That's why the
>fastest-growing category of supermarket food is ready-made meals in a box.
>
>The outsourcing of food prep is the greatest revolution in domestic life
>since indoor plumbing. You can track the steep decline of interest in
>cooking by the cookbooks on my shelf (the ones I never use, although I
>mean to). From the 1980s, there's the classic 60-Minute Gourmet. From the
>1990s, there's The 30-Minute Dinner. This week, I printed out an
>invaluable piece from The New York Times called "101 Simple Meals You Can
>Make in 10 Minutes or Less." I plan to try out a few of them, when I have
>the time.
>
>The trouble with not doing it yourself is that you eventually begin
>doubting your ability to do it at all. The less I cook, the less I feel I
>know how. I'd no more paint the house myself than I would try to make a
>dress (although each is theoretically doable).
>
>I don't even trust myself to arrange my own furniture. Instead, I call my
>friend, the interior designer, who is, after all, an expert.
>
>Sometimes, my husband and I wonder how we'd survive if, say, the entire
>power grid got knocked out for six months and there were suddenly no
>takeouts, no plumbers and no bank machines to get the money we use to pay
>for all the things we can't do ourselves. Here's our plan: We'll use our
>last tank of gas to drive up to the country and throw ourselves on the
>mercy of our neighbors - the ones with the Grade 8 education, the market
>garden, the shotgun and the beat-up pickup truck. Swampy odors never
>baffled them.
>
>We hope they'll take us in, even though we're useless.
>
>
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