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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] the learning curve

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the learning curve
  • Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2010 18:47:48 -0000


and I mean SOME of this information is good as a backup reference, but that information is widely available, any gardening book will contain it, I got a different one years ago at the thrift store for 1.69 and its been infinitely more helpful. "

I followed Steve Solomon's list for a few years and eventually had to give up because the man is playing only for an adoring public and does not stand for much critique.
Some things that really annoyed me :
- he has no thoughts about gmo's and advises use of gmo seed meal as fertilizer.
- He likes the use of pesticides such as roundup
- he has this idea that potassium is deadly and thinks that all gardens are already over-supplied with this mineral
- he is dead against building up a soil with compost or organic matter because he is convinced this breeds gazillions of crop eating pests apart from bringing even more unwanted potassium in.

-what broke this camels back was his dishonesty in connection with the use of charcoal as a soil amendment. I have been experimenting with charcoal for at least 15 years and have never seen it do any good in the garden and I have come to the conclusion that it is extremely bad for the planet to burn woods down to charcoal just for soil amendments.
Privately Steve Solomon admitted to me that he was experimenting with different concentrations of charcoal in his cannabis beds and that he could see no positive results.
Publicly on the list he ridiculed my position stating that there was such a hype going about charcoal that it simply had to be true. Maybe so of course, how could ten million lemmings be wrong?
john





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