In article ,
songbird wrote:

Gunner wrote:
...
Wow birdie! I had you pegged at no more than a day over 800 years
old. You old Shamanistas are amazing, but ya gotta get out more and
see how the real world has developed since you was a young girl. No
one going to go back to get you folks left behind, so keep up.
"Nothing is... because everything is becoming"

the real world development i see is to a
large part: ignorant, greedy, poisonous or
destructive to many creatures.

you'd like me to keep up with that?

there is some hope yet, but it is a
long ways to go.


Your objection here (or the pretense) appears to be cost? Is that
correct?

my objection is that the OP stated they were
a new gardener. which means very likely that they
were using a new space. any long time gardener
knows that new soil is often just fine for the
first season and needs no additional nutrients
added to it. short of obvious signs of deficit
(the OP stated none) why add fertilizer? because
we've been raised with cereal in the box and
milk out of the bottle doesn't mean that nutritional
value comes from boxes and bottles.

so instead of saying "yeah, go ahead dump
dilute liquid fertilizers on your garden it
won't hurt a thing." i recommended the OP do
some reading and learn about what they are
doing before adding anything to the soil, and
i pointed them towards organic methods because
they have less chance of being a runoff
pollutant problem and a better chance of
actually nurturing the soil organisms and
maintaining or improving nutrients in the soil
and thus the produce grown therein.

is that clear?

Score one for the Shamanista songbird.

State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet: A
Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society
(Paperback - Jan 2011)
http://www.amazon.com/State-World-20...able/dp/184971
3529/ref=sr_1_33?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310168545&sr=1-33
(At a library near you, until they close)

p 8
If seeds represent the short-term payoff
option, the truly long-term investment with big
returns is investing in the soil and water that
nourish crops. In Mali and other parts of the
African Sahel, soils are severely damaged from
overgrazing and drought, but the use of green
manure and cover crops can dramatically
improve soil fertility without the use of expensive
fertilizers. . . . [Roland] Bunch notes that
subsidizing chemical fertilizers, which some
African nations are doing heavily (by up to 75
percent in Malawi, for example), has generally
not been a good long-term strategy and actu-
ally reduces farmers' incentive to invest in
more agroecological approaches to nourishing
soils. When the fertilizer subsidies end, pro-
ductivity will drop to virtually nothing. Instead,
Bunch maintains that green manure/cover
crops are the only sustainable solution to
Africa's soil fertility crisis.12

--
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_vN0--mHug