North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Kieran &/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>]

Ya'll who aren't all that interested can skip the DDT comments and go down 
to some herbicide stories that might interest you.

DDT is interesting in how it transformed the world.  It was very effective 
in killing lice when dusted on people and their clothes, and so was used to 
stop typhus.  Do you remember in school they had diagrams of mosquitoes 
laying their eggs on water where they floated like little rafts?  I was 
puzzled by this for many years as all the mosquito eggs I have ever seen 
were in little jellylike blobs that stuck to the sides of containers till 
they hatched.   Finally I figured out that the rafts of eggs were 
specifically a malaria carrying species and that's why those mosquitoes were 
more susceptible to DDT than other species.  There was malaria in the USA, 
brought in with slaves, and there were the right kind of mosquitoes to carry 
it, I guess brought along in water in the same ships.  From what I read 
these days, DDT is still the best thing for dusting around houses to control 
malaria.  But there is another factor that is not being mentioned, and that 
is that corn in Africa really helps the malaria mosquitoes.   Corn pollen is 
high in protein and has been shown to produce extra large strong mosquito 
specimans that can fly further than the average.  Someone just happened to 
note that farmers had a lot more malaria in areas that grew a lot of maize. 
So a return to more traditional crops or keeping corn away from ponds could 
also help.
   There are some other oddities out there.  Someone was selling an 
interesting product that is not too different from household bleach, they 
called it MMS.  My husband ordered some a year or so back, and found he can 
get rid of sinus infections in short order with it.  The company he ordered 
it from recently sent him a note saying the FDA was making them stop sales 
of the product and that he could return the unused portion for a refund.  No 
way are they getting their hands on his remaining supply!  The guy who 
originally came up with it said you could cure malaria in 3 days with it. 
He had gone to Africa and the people were pestering him for medical 
supplies, he had nothing except his water purification drops, so he gave 
them to people, and they got better.  He did a good bit of testing and 
apparently it really does work on malaria.  Certainly there is no evidence 
that the guy was into any get rich quick scheme.
   I'm not necessarily a paranoid person, but I do notice things, like that 
the guy who just showed that CCD has nothing to do with Bayer's 
neo-nicotinoids had taken money from Bayer.  And that the FDA always seems 
to be on the side of the big companies and against the little people.  There 
is money being made in treating malaria.  It would hurt someone's income 
flow to stop malaria through cheap means, whether it be DDT or MMS.

   But back to our notions of producing food.  There are some nasty 
herbicides out there that you or your neighbors might be using or thinking 
of using.  When I visited where my middle son is staying, he said that the 
guy who owns the field across the road sprayed his pasture with something, 
and immediately all their free ranging hens began laying shell-less eggs. 
They got rid of the hens and waited months to get more, at which time 
everything seemed to be back to normal, which it probably isn't really.  I 
couldn't tell that the field is used for hay, there were no cattle on it. 
My son was baffled as to why the guy sprayed it at all, he thought it was 
for looks.
   Any of you who use hay, straw, or manure on your gardens or use compost 
made from any of these 3 need to know about persistent herbicides.  See 
various websites to learn more, this is probably the most useful: 
http://www.natureswayresources.com/resource/infosheets/killercompost.html. 
Four years ago we got some manure from a local stable and it seemed that the 
more we used the less well our plants did.  Weeds refused to grow on the 
leftover manure pile, even the following year.  I was told that there was an 
herbicide that you couldn't buy in our county but which was sold in nearby 
counties, and that it could persist in the soil.  So we avoided that stable 
but 2 years later we got horse manure from a different stable and had 
abnormal twisted growth in our pepper plants, which were the plants I'd been 
most generous to.  Still don't know if it might have been a pH thing and the 
old boron deficiency bugaboo again, but we decided to get some little 
fainting goats to serve as brush control and compost producers.   So the 
very first thing I had to do is buy a couple bales of hay.  Oops.  All 3 
feed stores in town carry only nice clean, weed free grass hay.  I couldn't 
find weedy hay, or hay with clover or red clover or lespedeza or alfalfa, 
just grass.  I poked at the bales and could not find one broadleaved plant 
in them.  Now I am careful to keep stocked up from farmers that I know who 
either have weeds in their hay or use only 2,4-D to control weeds.  (Yeah, 
who would have thought I'd prefer 2,4-D to anything?!)  I figure that the 
manure we are getting from our own goats is safer to use on the garden than 
anything else.   Donna