Interesting tidbit from a book

[helen99]

"The prototypical formal "urban" garden was invented in ancient Rome. It featured paved terraces, geometrical and highly formal beds edged with clipped evergreen hedges, topiaries, and statuary. The Roman "Manicured" look screamed, "Look! I have slaves!" because it was so incredibly labor intensive. The manicured look is still very energy intensive, though these days a lot of the work is accomplished with machines and chemicals.

The cost of hands-off gardening are still at least as high as they were in Pliny's day, when he complained: "He whose fields are cultivated in his absence by slave labor, agitates his fields and cultivates his own future desperation.". The desperation Pliny was referring to included loss of topsoil, loss of fertility, and erosion induced by agriculture and logging. Modern agriculture still suffers from the old complaints, but has added chemically polluted soil, air, and water to the ancient list."

Excerpted from Eat More DIRT: Diverting and Instructive Tips for Growing an Organic Garden, by Ellen Sandbeck.

Comments

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

It sounds like quite an interesting book. (^*^)

I wonder what sort of things can be used to extract/filter out the pollutants from the air and water and ground..

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Trees are good at that I think... The air is always clearer when there are untouched wild places left alone. Mushrooms take heavy metals out of the ground (but then you can't eat them after...) Inside the house, Spider plants are purported to filter the air really nicely. The trouble with natural means is that they were intended for a normal level of debris... and what's happening is tons and tons per second being dumped into the air and water and land. Even if they completely stopped right this instant, I doubt we have the means to get rid of all of it during our lifetime.

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

Maybe, maybe not.. but we can start during our lifetime. I'd like to have a garden that, rather than pruned and neatly placed and filled with evenly spaced flours and things, is filled with mushrooms and spiderplants and moss and whatever can help the whole yard work as its own filtration system, taking the toxins out of things and digesting them into substances more suitable for the environment.

I don't care about eating the mushrooms afterward.. if they can extract the metals, and digest them, and then something else can digest the mushrooms, and make those metals just sort of disappear, that would be great.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

> we can start during our lifetime.

Yes, definitely - no matter what, starting now is important.

I have just a few trees in my yard and it's pretty much free form with a lot of moss and all. But haven't been able to get mushrooms to grow - nothing grows in my yard except what the yard wants, I've noticed...