Happy Easter

[Lelandite]

Happy Easter to all my garden friends! May your plants be full of beautiful colored eggs and like seeds, grow beauty with love.

Happy Easter!

Donnna in WA

[Billy]

When gardeners garden, it is not just plants that grow,  but the gardeners themselves. 

-   Ken Druse

The soil temp is 60°F, we have a "go". Now, if I can just stay dry.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. ~ Margaret Atwood

[Bill who putters]

Ah the smell of soil and more.

.................

appeal to our senses, to our sight, touch, our sense of smell, even taste. Hans Jenny (1999) admired soils for their intrinsic beauty: I have seen so many delicate shapes, forms, and colours in soil profiles that, to me, soils are beautiful. Whenever I offer this reaction to an audience, I notice smiles and curiosity, but when I follow up with slides that depict ebony black mollisols of Canada, titian-red oxisols of Hawaii, and gorgeous soil-profile paintings by such famous artists as Grant Wood of Iowa, Dubuffet of France, and Schmidt-Rottluff of Germany, the hesitancy turns into applause?. Soil-profile art is not akin to classic paintings with themes; rather, it resembles abstract art: and if you are used to thinking of soil as dirt, which is customary in our society, you are not keyed to find beauty in it. Soil tasting is an old practice to test whether soils are sweet or sour. Roman farmers distilled soil through a wine strainer with water and drank the liquor. ?The best soils had neither salinity nor bitterness, but a sweet and open taste like the smell of fertile soil when it opens in the spring¹ (Logan 1995:64). Many cultures practise geophagy, or soil eating. A Siberian tribe carried small balls of local earth to nibble on their travels to remind them of home. Central American native communities ate clay tablets, Swedish and Finlanders used clay to extend bread in famine times, while the Japanese Ainu people have a clay lump soup. West African women eat earth processed by termites to obtain calcium. Many of us take a kaolin-based mixture to settle upset stomachs (Whole Earth 1999). Immunologists (Rook, Stanford 1998) think we need to eat more dirt as children to build up our immune systems. We don't smear dirt on our lips and inhale mycobacteria. We've broken the bonds of tens of millions of years of coevoultion of dirt and terrestrial-vertebrate immunology. Maybe it goes back even further. No matter. Without early childhood contact with these agents in soil (and unpurified water), with every flex of our First-World fetish for cleanliness, fewer antigens enter into our bodies to rehearse the ancient immunological troops. Without certain small diseases early in life, we may have more allergies later (Whole Earth 1999). Hans Jenny had a very sensual approach to the soil: ?Soil appeals to my senses. I like to dig in it and work it with my hands. I enjoy doing the soil texture field test with my fingers or kneading a clay soil, which is a short step from ceramics or sculpture. Soil has a pleasant smell. I like to sit on bare, sun-drenched ground and take in the fragrance of soil¹ (Jenny 1999). Many farmers and gardeners are enthralled by soil, not only because it feels good but because it ?brings us into relationship with the primal forces of life and death, both physically and symbolically. We nourish life from a seed, watch it grow, thrive, spring full of colour and vitality, and then wither and die. This is the natural order of things, of all life¹ (Johnson 2003).

[Billy]

I find that a real gardener is not one who cultivates flowers, but one who cultivates the soil

-- Karel Capek

[sockiescat]

I find that a real gardener is not one who cultivates flowers, but one who cultivates the soil

-- Karel Capek

- - Happy Easter to all my garden friends! May your plants be full of

beautiful colored eggs and like seeds, grow beauty with love.

Happy Easter!

Donnna in WA-

When gardeners garden, it is not just plants that grow,* but the gardeners themselves.*

-** Ken Druse

The soil temp is 60°F, we have a "go". Now, if I can just stay dry.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. ~ Margaret Atwood-

Ah the smell of soil and more.

................

appeal to our senses, to our sight, touch, our sense of smell, even taste. Hans Jenny (1999) admired soils for their intrinsic beauty:

I have seen so many delicate shapes, forms, and colours in soil profiles

that, to me, soils are beautiful. Whenever I offer this reaction to an

audience, I notice smiles and curiosity, but when I follow up with slides that depict ebony black mollisols of Canada, titian-red oxisols

of Hawaii, and gorgeous soil-profile paintings by such famous artists as

Grant Wood of Iowa, Dubuffet of France, and Schmidt-Rottluff of Germany,

the hesitancy turns into applause?. Soil-profile art is not akin to classic paintings with themes; rather, it resembles abstract art: and if

you are used to thinking of soil as dirt, which is customary in our society, you are not keyed to find beauty in it. Soil tasting is an old practice to test whether soils are sweet or sour.

Roman farmers distilled soil through a wine strainer with water and drank the liquor. ?The best soils had neither salinity nor bitterness,

but a sweet and open taste like the smell of fertile soil when it opens

in the spring¹ (Logan 1995:64). Many cultures practise geophagy, or soil

eating. A Siberian tribe carried small balls of local earth to nibble on

their travels to remind them of home. Central American native communities ate clay tablets, Swedish and Finlanders used clay to extend

bread in famine times, while the Japanese Ainu people have a clay lump

soup. West African women eat earth processed by termites to obtain calcium. Many of us take a kaolin-based mixture to settle upset stomachs

(Whole Earth 1999). Immunologists (Rook, Stanford 1998) think we need to

eat more dirt as children to build up our immune systems. We don't smear dirt on our lips and inhale mycobacteria. We've broken the bonds of tens of millions of years of coevoultion of dirt and terrestrial-vertebrate immunology. Maybe it goes back even further. No

matter. Without early childhood contact with these agents in soil (and

unpurified water), with every flex of our First-World fetish for cleanliness, fewer antigens enter into our bodies to rehearse the ancient immunological troops. Without certain small diseases early in life, we may have more allergies later (Whole Earth 1999). Hans Jenny had a very sensual approach to the soil: ?Soil appeals to my

senses. I like to dig in it and work it with my hands. I enjoy doing the

soil texture field test with my fingers or kneading a clay soil, which

is a short step from ceramics or sculpture. Soil has a pleasant smell. I

like to sit on bare, sun-drenched ground and take in the fragrance of soil¹ (Jenny 1999). Many farmers and gardeners are enthralled by soil,

not only because it feels good but because it ?brings us into relationship with the primal forces of life and death, both physically

and symbolically. We nourish life from a seed, watch it grow, thrive, spring full of colour and vitality, and then wither and die. This is the

natural order of things, of all life¹ (Johnson 2003).-

[Billy]

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet. -- Kahil Gibran

Just google , and you will have a bountiful harvest ;O)