Leaf Mold, Do Tell..

[Charlie]

Well, I'm convinced... and pleased that less work appears to be another benefit. Even what I have been doing has had great results; less weeds, increased production, increased plant population (which results in cooler soil temps and a living mulch canopy) and very few bad bugs. I am looking forward to this. This sounds like it could easily be implemented on a large scale.

Thanks.

Care Charlie

[Scott Hildenbrand]

Well... I'm glad my simplistic question has sparked a less is more conversation. However hard to follow at times that it may be, still entertaining and informative... And what seems to be helpful to alot of you.. :)

[Charlie]

It sure was helpful and I *will* remember that your question sparked it all. Perhaps many of my descendants will be appreciative as well.

Funny the effect a small, simple act, or question, can have... and that is well worth my remembering! This applies to many things.

Care, and thank you Scott Charlie

[Charlie]

See my post aways down below re: Household Compost Activator

Charlie, listening to, believe it or not, Jonn Serrie - Yuletides

[Charlie]

I liked Michael Pollan's nine-step program on another page

Damn, I gotta read the Books.

Charlie, now listening to Soul Ballet, Trip The Night Fantastic

--------------------------------------------

If Wendell Berry is America's unofficial farmer laureate, Michael Pollan is making a very good case for being the moral voice of the American eater. His most recent essay in the New York Times offers nine concrete suggestions on how we can build a better food system, one bite at a time:

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don?t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn?t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn?t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

1. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They?re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don?t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg?s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don?t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

2. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number ? or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

1. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won?t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer?s market; you also won?t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

2. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There?s no escaping the fact that better food ? measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) ? costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils ? whether certified organic or not ? will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

?Eat less? is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. ?Calorie restriction? has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called ?Hara Hachi Bu?: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the ?eat less? message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don?t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

1. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what?s so good about plants ? the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? ? but they do agree that they?re probably really good for you and certainly can?t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you?ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less ?energy dense? than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (?flexitarians?) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

1. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren?t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn?t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals ? and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can?t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

2. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

1. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of ?health.? Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It?s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn?t bordered by your body and that what?s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

[Ann]

Charlie expounded:

Yes you do! Everyone needs to read The Omnivore's Dilemma. People have to learn what's been done to our food. This statement is so telling: "Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation". Cheap food isn't all it's cracked up to be.....

[Charlie]

Ahh, c'mon, can't I just do the cliff's books routine and listen to a few more podcasts???

Damn, why did I just get this feeling of being back in school and Mrs. Richards standing over me in English class? ;-) BTW, she was my neighbor and favorite teacher, feisty as hell and back in the days before, not afraid to box your ear when necessary. She even gave me hell in my, or her, own backyard when necessary.

Charlie

[Charlie]

Cheap is right! I picked up a fifty pounder at the feed store today for a whole whoppin' ten bucks.

[Ann]

Charlie expounded:

You could, but you'd miss all the little meanderings he goes through. Just when he gets almost stiflingly clinical he goes off on a jaunt that leads to wonderful places :o)

Sounds like my kind of woman! A teacher who taught because she loved it. Lucky you!

[Charlie]

Oh Fine! Next time I haul my butt out of the hermitage and get off to the big city, I'll pick it up.

She is one of a kind. Could swear with the best of them, smoked continually when not in class, kept an AXE HANDLE in class and used it on miscreants, lovingly but with enough pain to drive the point home, and then you received the honor of being able to sign the damn hard thing. Was into Rodale before anyone even heard of Rodale and hooked me on a better way. She was the most revered teacher to ever walk the halls of our little high school. I love her to pieces.

She is still living and in Palmer Alaska. In her early nineties and still sharp as a tack... she jokes about not being able to see or walk well. It's been a few years since I talked to her, though Mom does a couple times a year. I'm glad this came to mind in this exchange.

And I apologize to you for our recent set-to. I went over the top and should have just kept my big fat mouth shut and observed the two-minute rule on posting.....something I often have trouble doing, keeping my mouth shut, that is.

The weather has changed and I have now come into my season and perhaps my humour shall moderate. :-)

Care & Peace Charlie

[cat daddy]

Yep, and because it's feed, there's no tax. Something else I like to pick up is dry molasses. That's mostly a feel good thing for me, although they say it stimulates beneficial microorganisms. It has trace elements, but I like the smell, especially when I play around making aerobic teas.......

[cat daddy]

That's a hard one. Naturally, all roots stay in the ground after a plant dies. And, if you think of a field of mixed plants, their roots must all interwine. But, I imagine disturbing the soil structure on that level is not so great that it would recover quickly. I always shake the dirt back in the hole anyway.

It's not an original idea with me. I read an article where some places it's become quite the fashion. Getting rid of the concept of a lawn has to become more commonplace. It's wasteful and uninteresting.

Thanks for the recomendations..... I have wild chile pequenos that a neighbour picks and eats right off the bush. Not for me, thanks, but there are some others I'd like to grow.

Thanks for the links. I knew of the Seeds of Change site, and must plan on ordering some stuff from them.

[Cheryl Isaak]

Anytime Charlie - fall is for reflection and a good way to start the new year. Spring, like hope, is far too fleeting.

Cheryl

[Cheryl Isaak]

Wish my kids could get a few of those. Though, I do like my son's history teacher. Lots of love for the subjects and for the kids.

C

[Charlie]

Whoa! Aerobic teas... you didn't finish and just left me hangin'! what? I gotta research this myself?

This has opened up a whole new area of fun.

Does this link provide a good idea of what you are talking about?

have recipes that add canned mackeral and all sorts of goodies.

Man, we have to be talkin' some seriously good odours!

Again, thanks.

Charlie

[cat daddy]

Yeah, well.......... didn't want to bring out the pro- or anti- zealots particularly, and it was late. I tried, but deleted whatever else I was going to say about it. Discussion of tea making makes the discussion of composting methods pale in comparison.

Here's another with a list of what's in alfalfa tea, although it's not aerobic with an air bubbler, and will smell like a cow produced it.

They have recipes that add canned mackeral and all sorts of goodies. >

[William Wagner]

My dad used to empty out his freezer once or twice a year. He is known to place old fish and other expired food stuffs in large glass containers which fermented out in the garden. He then mixed a cup or two with a gal of water which he feed to weak or sickly plants especially ones with insects. We knew when he worked this magic and did other things for a day two.

Bill

[Charlie]

More good ideas, thanks.

Your Dad sounds like someone I would like to know or have known.

You are fortunate, as are your "boys".

Charlie, listening to Clapton's "Old Love". Perfect day here for slow blues

[cat daddy]

In the big picture, something's always food for something else. So, whatever it was your dad was fermenting, either it was good in and of itself, or it fed or attracted something that was, most probably. That's what attracts me to the alchemy of making teas, although I do prefer the more pleasant smelling kind.

[Charlie]

After reading, and thinking, about this at some length today, I understand why it was simpler for you to just put up a roadsign.

Thanks.

Charlie