Re: sanet-mg-digest V1 #754
Frank Teuton (fteuton@total.net)
Tue, 12 Jan 1999 06:57:13 -0500
Eliza Lindsay wrote:
>
>Well, I don't know where you live but I was able to find one of her books
>in the local library. I found her style repetive and dull, to be honest
>and though her mulch no-till is a fetching and winning concept I also
>believe her book reads like many "garden guru" books: Do what I do it
>WORKS. Where basically they have generalized from their positive
>experiences in very specific situations and micro-climes and seem to
>suggest it's as easy as pie to just replicate any old place. That really
>isn't true as we all know. And, indeed, I'm in the process of figuring out
>how I can better adapt no/low till "mulch" methods to my gardening
>situation where (a) we are the slug capital of north america and relatedly
>have very long slow as all get out to warm up very wet springs and (b)
>where I've got too much garden to mulch as deeply as she and many other
>no-till mulch types recommend but where I am also very low on the
>mechanical end of things/very small scale and almost
>entirely human-powered....
>
>I've got some good sucess and some dismal mishaps so far. What I am up to
>is probably far different from your methods of no-till although I find in
>reading your posts and etc. lots of useful tidbits for thinking about my
>own situation.
The one revelation I've had since reflecting about Ruth Stout and
perma-mulching is that Ruth had no slug problem, in all likelyhood, because
she had a quackgrass infestation prior to beginning the permanent mulch
system and likely used hay with a quackgrass component (quackgrass=
Agropyron repens).
Work done at Cornell by Hagin indicated a slug-icidal substance develops in
dried quackgrass; this was reported in an Organic Gardening supplement on
weed and pest control in 1997.
I've reduced slug pops dramatically by using this, also leaving areas
undisturbed for ground beetle habitat. Like Eliza my major mulch feedstock
is leaves, not hay as Ruth's was...
Ruth's first books are more interesting; you get a fuller picture of her
progression.
Frank Teuton
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