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15
Montgomery Road
P. O. Box 186
Huntington, MA 01050
Ph: 413-667-5786
Katheryn Darrow
Experienced
gardener available for Design, Installation, Restoration &
Maintenance. I use hand tools and practice Soil-building,
Integrated Pest Management, and Organic Gardening methods. No
charge for first consultation.
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SOIL BUILDING
I see great stacks of peat moss for sale these
days, usually imported from Canada. It takes digging, baling,
transporting, and marketing to bring it into our back
yards—at a great transfer from back-aching
labor into dollars. I once saw an Irish movie
called The Field
where the old man carried on his shoulders loads of kelp to
spread on his field.
It became the most prized field in his neighborhood and caused
trouble and envy. We, in the early years of the 21st
Century, can march ourselves down to the local
garden supply store to
purchase a bale of peat, almost without thinking where it came
from, or its eons of creation.
In my own backyard, earthworms abound
underneath the cardboard mulch that I
used last year. As I dig, I see the creatures, writing,
curling, escaping from perceived danger. Once my little
brother and I built a house for an earthworm and were shocked
the next day to find it absent. Some folks
order earthworms from a catalog, but I expect they live
underground all the time, just waiting for favorable
conditions.
William Cullen Bryant foretold to his
Cummington neighbors that once a farm of
300acres could sustain a family, but now ( a generation later)
it would take twice that amount of land. In Tidewater
Virginia, raising Tobacco used up the nutrients of the
rich fertile soil. What was to follow was not
tobacco culture, but the cultures of
human
slaves.
I am one of those human beings who belong to no pigeon-hole.
Not a true
scientist, not a humanist, not a nature writer, not a gardener
per se, yet I love to talk about my passions and mostly New
England.
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