GMO - Organic & what the hell!!!

[Marco]

I bet ***** don't smell as good as Atrazine and crop oil in the sprayer tank.

 

[Marco]

Price of fuel, lack of labor. City folk used to take their vacation so they could come help on the farm, now we need to be entertained, and your doing it wrong.
Waiting for Chipotle to show up with their checkbook and set me right.

 

[chuckwood]

Did you ever wonder why people don't keep crusty dog **** in thier refrigerators?
Probably never occured to you, but it's as nasty as keeping **** next to where thier food is grown.

If people are paying your GF for Ecoli, Choliform, Salmonella, Enterococcous spp, slathered veggies from her cute little hothouse, good for her.
I'd like nothing better than all the damn Hippies to eat **** and die, and they are paying her to do it.

Then you need to consider "peecycling". Not everything old liberals and hippies do is bad or unworkable. Here's how it goes. Urea is one of the raw ingredients used in making nitrogen fertilizers. It's also the prime component of human urine. Countless tons of valuable nitrogen fertilizer are flushed down toilets every day. So what hippies do is pee in jugs instead and put it back in their gardens. Pee is essentially sterile, it doesn't contain pathogens unless you have a kidney infection.
This saves money on your water and sewer bills, and helps the environment and saves energy, a win-win any way you look at it. You save money on not having to buy nitrogen fertilizer. It can be fun for the whole family, you'd be amazed at how much pee can be produced by a family of four or five. It's a bit more complicated for the ladies in that they will need something more elaborate to use than just a wide mouth plastic bottle. But there is no reason they can't get enthusiastic about peecycling as well. One possible solution is using a five gallon bucket modified with a seat around the rim to make it more comfortable. If you are really serious about peecycling, get your neighbors involved, they too will enjoy the benefits of reduced water bills and being environmentally responsible, even if they don't have gardens, and you will enjoy having a huge supply of urea for those heavy nitrogen feeders like corn. Of course, you'll need to share a bit of your crop with your neighbors if they help with the fertilizing. For old hippies with prostrate problems there is nothing more annoying than having to wake up all the time during the night to go to pee in the bathroom. But with peecycling, no problem. The peepot is right under the bed, not in another room or at the other side of the room. You won't have to bother with turning lights on. Life is always better when things are convenient and peecyling makes it so!

 

[Dalmatian90]

Few years back my mom (79) was recalling how she used to pick mushrooms as a five year old. Here grandparents would double check her basket afterwards to make sure she didn't pick any bad ones by mistake.

Then she suddenly realized after all those decades one of her best picking spots was out in the horse pasture where another of her chores during good weather was to dump their pisspots. (Bad weather she got to just pour them out in the outhouse). They didn't have indoor plumbing till after WWII, which is kind of amazing to think how quickly standards change, since my grandparents you'd consider middle class and my grandfather was a white-collar worker for most of his life.

 

[NCTREE]

Well shucks, I thought the place fer fussin' and fightin' was over in the political/religion forum. Well, here's my experience. About ten years ago, I was using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, otherwise not much of a crop could be expected. The reason being the garden area was just plain old worn out from around 100 years of gardening on that same spot. Many decades ago my dad had rejuvenated it by bringing in truckloads of composted leaves, he basically used the Ruth Stout gardening method and got very good results. He did it all the hard way with no tiller. But as the years went by, he got old, and the garden plot just wore out again as I took over (with plenty of tillers). For the past three years I've been bringing in leaf compost by the tandem dumptruck load. The soil is getting rich, soft, and black. I realize not everybody can do this, but it sure does make an incredible difference. About all I fertilize now is the corn and a few other heavy feeders like okra. Before long, I figure I won't even have to do that. What has *really* impressed me is the fact that I don't have near as much damage from insect pests as before when the soil was in poor shape. Last year I never sprayed my taters except once for flea beetles, and I did that with organic pyrethrin - it probably was not needed, they don't do that much damage - but I had NO potato beetles and my plants were very healthy. Years before, one of the regular chores was spraying Sevin to kill Colorado tater beetles. I hated doing that because I knew that the stuff I was spraying was going to leave residues on the taters and eating Sevin is just not good for you. I'm aiming this year to use only organic pesticides when needed, and if things keep going my way, I won't be using much, if any. I do believe that healthy plants make healthy food.

We are going to start experimenting with permaculture this year I am a tree guy and have unlimited supply to wood chips. I have a pile that i've been turning for a couple years. I think it's feasible on a large scale production farm if you have access to the chips. So many benefits to it like less irrigation and weed competition, minimal fertilizing.

 

[Marco]

Slide the outhouse over and get a shovel.