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  • From: Alliums <garlicgrower AT snip.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Problems starting plants & herbicide persistence
  • Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 06:04:21 -0500


Ted wrote:

> I hesitate to offer advice to a woman who carries home
>blue ribbons from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society harvest show,

Hey! Don't forget the red ribbon I finally got on the last day of judging
for my African Milk Bush at the just-completed Flower Show! I'm moving up
in the world (and that Solanum is only going to get older and bigger! ;-D)!

>[[Now, if you're actually using
>vermicompost and not pure castings then you'll use 25% vermicompost in
>place of the castings and reduce the amount of organic matter
>correspondingly.....

It looks like I'm using vermicompost rather than pure castings -- as I have
to harvest myself through a fairly wide screen, I know there are bits of
this and that which are just too small to bother to pick out. If I had a
open system like Joseph Griffin at Covered Bridge in Reading, where you pile
everything in a large frame outside such that the pure castings fall out
through a fine mesh screen at the bottom so that you can just rake the
castings out, then I think my "product" would be more pure. However, using
vermicompost seems to be working and for my uses, I don't seem to need pure
castings.

>At this winter's PASA conference, in a talk on Penn State's high tunnel
>research,

Sally and I didn't go this year, as it seemed too livestock oriented for our
purposes. Seeing the articles around here lately, I *did* just ask my
pastor if we could have pigs at the community garden, but she wasn't
appreciative of the request! ;-( (And she's more PA Dutch than I am! ;-D)


> You can get a summary from Eric Burkhart at Penn State
>[epb6 AT psu.edu], and I hope he won't mind if I quote his concluding
>paragraph:

He won't mind. We desperately need more stats around here! :-D

> But this herbicide persistence is a drag.
>Many of the veg growers and CSA's in our area face encroaching housing
>development, and one unusual benefit they can derive is being able to take
>in carbon--leaves and grass clippings--from landscapers and nearby
>municipalities. All the more reason for us to encourage suburban
>homeowners to get their lawns off drugs.

Exactly. Life changes. Rodale was *strongly* encouraging folks to grow
potatoes in old tires for *years* -- I never liked the idea of it, but lots
of folks at my community garden did it. Then, 2 years ago, they reversed
themselves completely when they were able to measure smaller levels of Zn,
etc and warned folks not to do it. I strongly suspect the same deal is
happening with compost -- everyone said things were fine because they
couldn't find any levels -- now that there are better measuring instruments,
folks are finding things they weren't finding before.

Weaning the locals from ChemLawn (and/or encouraging folks to landscape with
shrubs/ground covers/whatever, rather than lawns) is probably going to do
more to clean up ground water/compost/etc in the suburban/urban areas than
anything else. I'm starting to give out herb divisions from the perennial
area of the community garden to encourage landscaping with other than lawns
-- and I've given up the grass in my tiny backyard in favor of the medieval
ideal of having herbs to walk on. I've heard good things about oregano as a
ground cover, but right now, I've planted out spearmint -- even small
children running all over it can't possibly kill it and it does smell nice
when stepped on!

Dorene Pasekoff, Coordinator
St. John's United Church of Christ Organic Community Garden

A mission of
St. John's United Church of Christ, 315 Gay Street, Phoenixville, PA 19460




  • Re: Problems starting plants & herbicide persistence, Alliums, 03/23/2001

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