Avant Gardening with Sturtz & Copeland

When thinking about plants, it’s important to remember that life on our planet wouldn’t exist without them. By taking seemingly intangible elements from the air, ground and water,  and combining them with sunlight-plants perform everyday miracles upon which our survival depends.
Think about it, plants germinate, grow, reproduce and respond to their environment in the same basic ways we do. But they do it without a brain or central nervous system, without muscles or a skeletal system, without any apparent premeditation. Which, as one British horticulturist noted, should give some of our more smug vegetarian friends pause. Plants utilize the fourth dimension– time-in ways unknown to us.

Plants are a 200 million year-old experiment that continues to this day. As Michael Pollan pointed out in his excellent book The Botany of Desire, plants are using us to their ends at least as much as we use them to ours.

(more…)

To read the first part of this post, click here.

Only once people realized, some 4,000 years ago, that they could harvest seeds and plant them, did civilization begin. Hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists, camps became cities, and social, military and economic strata arose. Early farmers were selecting for plants and animals that were bigger, tastier, stronger and faster growing. In the Middle East wheat proved to be the grain of choice. Halfway across the world in ancient Mexico corn began development. And in the Far East rice cultivation arose. Crops were selected for specific qualities suited to a specific area. These crops-known to some as “landraces”-fostered a genetic diversity.
With the advent of modern agriculture, this diversity shrank to the vanishing point. The Green Revolution of the 1950’s stressed, among other dubious ideas, genetic conformity and monocultural farming practices.
This in turn meant that many of the staples of our existence-wheat, corn, rice potatoes, bananas-had very little genetic depth and a very high chance of failure should a pest or disease get a foothold.
At the same time Robert Rodale was starting a revolution of his own in Pennsylvania. He was the father of modern organic gardening, which stressed building the soil and discarding the many poisonous chemicals associated with modern farming.
His methods stressed sustainability and the incorporation of natural methods of fighting off pests and diseases.
Since the first publishing of his book in 1947, organic gardening has become gospel among health-conscious gardeners, for good and occasionally ill.

(more…)