Juli Lawrence – Rakish Gardening

September 15th, 2007

Phil Hendrie is funnier than all get out. (Radio host guy at night) I’m a talk radio junkie for sure, and was aggravated when a guy (Crane Durham) I’d listened to for a long time got moved to early morning. But I finally got over my heartbreak and gave Hendrie a chance, and now I look forward to him every night. It’s the kind of humor that either you’ll think he’s hilarious and quite talented or just stupid. I can’t explain his type of humor: you can only experience it and enjoy or not enjoy it. He sometimes makes me laugh so hard that I lose body function control.

That said, he was ranting tonight about organic farming and how organic foods might contain bad things and not be as healthy as people (especially the organic industry) think. Oh big whoop….the e coli in spinach was proof of that. Wasn’t it organically grown?

His main point seemed to be the idea that it’s all about hybrids versus old-fashioned fruits/vegetables. He didn’t call them hybrids, but that’s what he meant when he talked about the corn natives grew compared to corn we grow today. I got the idea he thinks organic farmers/gardeners are against hybrids. So not true. In fact, “hybrids” occur very naturally when a bee lands on one cucumber type, then drops pollen from that one onto another cucumber and if you save the seed, you’ll have a hybrid next year. Seed producers just take it to a new level, remove the bees from the equation and make better varieties. I’ve never heard of anyone organic – even the most militant organic grower – thinking hybrids are a bad thing. They’re great.

I do organic for a couple of reasons, and healthier food isn’t one of them. I think if I had one tomato grown organically next to a tomato grown with Sevin and a dose of that nasty green stuff, oh yeah, Miracle Gro, they’d be pretty close on the healthy scale. That assumes you don’t sprinkle Sevin two minutes before eating. Duh. Sevin isn’t that bad for people (IMO, when used properly), but it’s disastrous for the bees (and other good critters), and bees are absolutely necessary to grow. If you kill the bees, then don’t bitch when your melons are deformed. Or learn to hand pollinate with a qtip.

I also don’t have a problem with people who don’t grow organic. I don’t buy organic stuff at the store for a variety of reasons and I do eat meat. It’s not organic…it’s full of all kinds of junk I don’t want to think about.

Coming from a farming family, I recognize you don’t have time to release batches of lady beetles and dance around with them while they munch on aphids.

The reason I started organic was because I liked bringing in the butterflies and birds, something rather new to me. Especially the birds – having lived most of my life in the country, pets got to go outdoors into the yard, including cats. So I never did the bird thing. Now that I live in town (the burbs…ugh to malls, Ikea and Wal Mart…they hurt my eyes), my pets are indoors 100 percent and I now have bird feeders, a bird bath, butterfly garden and butterfly bath.

I thought it would be pretty f-ing rude to bring all these critters in, then POISON THEM WITH SEVIN. That’s mean. Why not just let the cats out while they’re feeding, or put out a salt lick for the deer, then get out the rifle?

There ARE idiots who do the salt lick thing, and that’s just bad form. If you do that, you are a sucky hunter and should go on a nice long snipe hunt. Salt licks used to draw deer into a trap are illegal, or were last time I knew. A real hunter wouldn’t do that. Ted Nugent would never do that.

So I went organic, to be nice to the butterflies and birds. Then as I stopped using chemicals, I started getting a lot more bugs…good bugs. Lady beetles like crazy, lacewings, dragonflies even. And more and more butterflies. I like them all.

It turns out that Mother Nature is a lot more intelligent than she’s given credit for. Let her take control, and she does a pretty decent job of pest control by keeping the bugs in balance.

And, it’s kind of cool, too, going to the cabinet and pulling out things to use to combat pest and disease. Like cinnamon. How often do we eat cinnamon toast? Twice a year? So I get to use all that cinnamon to combat mold on peat pots. (Works great, btw.)

Okay, so I wouldn’t buy cornmeal normally, but it sounds wicked to say “Hey, I added a bag of cornmeal to the soil to fight fungus and damping off. Yeah.”

Nothing against cornmeal, but I’m not from the south and don’t eat cornbread.

As I stopped using chemicals, I started learning about insects and turns out most insects aren’t really a problem. You just have to learn to not freak out when you see one and think it’s going to eat your entire garden. I will confess that organic is complicated at first. A lot more complicated than “douse everything in Sevin and dump on some Miracle Gro.”

The compost pile? Actually, LAZINESS caused that one. We have two trees that drop a zillion leaves. Can’t burn in town, and you have to bag them up in those big paper lawn bags. It’s a real nightmare and a horrible job in fall. It’s a heck of a lot easier to use the sucker vacuum chopper and put those leaf pieces into a compost pile, then add garbage all winter and get compost. Plus it’s good for your soil and it smells real good. It’s easier to haul that around in a wheelbarrow than buy and haul bags of god-knows-what from Lowes. (p.s. using the vacuum sucker chopper tool is electric and probably not so good for the environment….I’m all for trying to be somewhat green, but with the realization that it’s all six of one and half dozen of the other, and when you do one thing to help, you’re just trading one thing for another…it’s true. Check out how much energy it takes to MAKE ethanol.)

Awww, darn it, my goal was to NOT rant in this blog. Just post happy hippie flower child stuff and tales of frolicking with the lacewing eggs, which are my fairy dust.

The point I wanted to make is this: Phil Hendrie, like so many who know NOTHING about gardening and farming because he’s probably a New Yorker (no complaints please…my husband is a New Yorker so I can make fun of them), doesn’t know squat. He seems to think organic gardening is all about NEVER using hybrids.

Um, no. I use hybrids all the time. I grow *some* heirlooms, but mostly I grow hybrids. They aren’t aliens, they’re just two varieties that had the sex and made a special baby plant.

Hendrie doesn’t get it, but he’s still funny as hell. Of course maybe the rant on organics was just part of his schtick.

The end.

• Organic gardening – the overview

Posted in Organic Gardening | 4 Comments »