Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

> I wish I knew what would spark people's interest--a larger percentage of
> people, I mean. I read somewhere that gardening was the fastest growing 
> "hobby" in the US in 2010. A hobby, of course, doesn't feed your family, 
> but certainly some of those people will continue to grow at least some of 
> their food.
>
> I'm afraid I think the only thing that will make a real difference is 
> skyrocketing food prices, and when that occurs, we'll probably be close to 
> the end of this year's growing season again, months from when growing your 
> own would help. I can't even get my own daughter interested in gardening. 
> She says she has "too much to deal with right now." Translated: it's 
> easier to buy plastic-wrapped dinners to put in the microwave.
>
> Believe me, if I had any idea how to get people seriously interested in 
> growing their own food, I'd be shouting it from the housetops.
>
> Liz

Growing food is not so simple it seems. We have been doing it for twenty 
years and more and normally never buy vegetables. However this year we had 
two periods of more than a week each where we got snow covered and 
temperatures dropped to unknown lows for Ireland of -16 where I live and 
lower than -20 C in other places. Thaw for this second period started 
yesterday and today we got more than 15 inches of rain so far. It looks like 
a fair disaster. Most of our winter staples suffered badly even in the poly 
tunnels partly because all our water sources froze solid and even propane 
gas bottles refused to give gas.
And the birds that do not plow and do not sow dropped dead in their hundreds 
literally. In the past week we must have had ten thousand migratory 
copper-wing trushes from Scandinavia on our fields and many hundreds of 
small waders and even when we did what we could to give them something to 
eat it was not enough. Also with the food freezing solid too fast.
We still have to get through a few bad months before Spring arrives here and 
if we get another bad period it will be worse. The roads in our part of the 
country were completely impassable for the last week and the frost made many 
new pot holes under the ice. This evening there were plates of tarmac being 
ripped up and floating downhill with a 4 inch deep stream that was a road.
john