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Page 2 of 35
FOREWARD
In 1970 the author "inherited" a large garden that had belonged to a long time J. I. Rodale devotee. As spring rolled around, the next door neighbor, Mike Lasko, came over and said, "Do you want some help tilling." I did, and a great friendship was born.
Not too long after the first transplants went out, Mike dropped over and asked if I had a sprayer. Hearing that I did not, he said, "Well, you've got to get one---or borrow mine. You'll be needing Malathion soon enough." Being a reader of Organic Gardening, I declined---with the thought that I would instead try the much-touted OG 'bug juice' insect control if that became necessary.
Each time that summer that Mike sprayed he would yell over, "Are you ready to spray?" I kept declining because the bugs never came. What did come were hungry friends who couldn't seem to get over the great taste of that garden's bounty. "What variety is that carrot?" they would say. I was several times accused of playing with the truth when I responded that the 'variety' was simply a 5-cent pack of seeds I had bought at the drug store on sale.
Another thing that came were customer raves when my wife started taking the veggie overflow to the office building where she worked. Soon each office was begging her to see them first. Finally, the customers started looking out the windows to see when my wife arrived so they could run down the stairs to buy ALL the produce before she could get into the building.
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"Can you believe that you can take pretty much identical-looking hay from neighboring fields, feed 50 pounds a day from one field to a cow and have her drop in milk production and get sick, and feed half as much from the other field and have the cow rise in production and be healthy? What is the difference between the two samples of hay? QUALITY!"
---Dr. Harold Willis "How To Grow Great Alfalfa"
Anyone who can’t make a connection between the above quote and the importance of only putting high-quality fruits and vegetables into their body is reading the wrong book.
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Yes, that 50' x 150' patch, whose soil had been built up so lovingly by a previous owner, brought us many spare-time dollars even as it provided abundant bounty for our table.
In 1987 I bought 16 acres that had been chemically farmed. The very first vegetables were tasteless. The crop the following year was again tasteless and the insects were again having a field day---spittle bugs, caterpillars, every pest known to man seemed to be after those almost bitter turnips, radishes, and other plants. It was time to do some serious research.
Dr. Arden Andersen's treatise on ecological agriculture suggested obtaining a refractometer to test one's output. I did, and small-scale farming has never been the same for me since. The mystery of that earlier bug-proof garden with its scrumptious fruits was soon revealed. It's so simple: when the brix is low, the taste is poor, and the insects come. When the brix is high, the taste is superb and the insects seem to busy themselves elsewhere. The farmer's job is simply to remineralize and fertilize in such a way that the plants, properly fed, can develop higher brix.
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| I've studied much agriculture since then. Clearly, the conventional farmers should not use toxic chemicals to rescue crops that are obviously sick---and then sell them to you. However, they can't be blamed: so much of their education comes via the agriculture schools that are supported by chemical company grants. On the other hand, I'm often baffled by organic growers who simply substitute dangerous organic insect controls for the synthetic poisons. Very few people seem to understand what the word quality truly should mean. |
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