Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
|
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Ruth Stout , here I come
Derald wrote:
songbird wrote: the money spent on the tillers (two, several hundred each) could easily have financed my seed, tool and hose buys for the next 10 - 20 years. That's something I've never done. The closest I've come to a power gardening tool is my dad's Derald-powered push plow. As you know, by "tilling" (as distinct from "rototilling"), I mean using hands, four-tined spading fork, or shovel, pretty much in that order of priority/frequency. Hands and/or fork blend in a pretty standard blend of amendments plus a healthy dose of alfalfa and a fair share of whatever compost may be available along with whatever volume of legendary horse dung looks "right". Sometimes, though, I just push back the mulch and plant, just like Ruth Stout. it was done long before i moved back here, and both were destroyed along with other equipment before my time. now all that extra dead metal and wasted space hogging stuff is gone and we're down to one large weedwhacker which i've not needed to use since 2006, the lawn mower and the hedge trimmers (which are useful for chopping back the green manure patch). there are some gardens here that i can do some work in without having to use a shovel, but other than those most of the rest of the gardens would break your hands if you tried to stick your fingers in them. they are getting better as i keep putting good organic stuff in them and the worms do their magic, but like you said before it takes time. Harvesting compost from my "everbearing" compost pile and digging in the garden with hands are, respectively, my two favorite gardening activities. The shovel gets used, maybe once each year to loosen the soil deeper than the reach of the fork and every two-three years to dig deeply enough to cut invasive tree roots that the fork won't handle. As you observe, tools, tillers, and such put earthworms and insects on which I depend heavily to maintain the garden's health at risk. Hell, no: I AM NOT OBSESSIVE with this damned gardening jones, it's just a phase....:-) it's a good phase IMO. respect for the earth is something so many people either don't care about or they just have no connection to it at all. go outside? what's that? bugs? eww! etc. *sigh* the other thing that gets me cranky is to watch the farmers around me turn their fields into dead subsoil. when i was a kid, when the farmers would plow the birds would follow along behind so they could get the bugs and the worms - now when they plow you don't see the birds out there much at all. wish i could afford to buy them all out around us and do a community farm and gardens space, but i don't have that kind of $$$. songbird |
Reply |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Bllra Peggy Ruth Carpenter 'Morning Joy' | Orchid Photos | |||
Bllra Peggy Ruth Carpenter 'Morning Joy' x3 | Orchid Photos | |||
Bllra Peggy Ruth Carpenter 'Morning Joy' x2 | Orchid Photos | |||
Bc. Llano x C. Ruth Gee | Orchid Photos | |||
Ruth - Mystery | Orchids |