The Wilderness Garden (Aird Books 1993): a radical new view of Australian growing methods $16.95 Australian. http://www.jackiefrench.com/wilderness.html

There is no need to dig your garden - or weed it or cart great armfuls of mulch. There's no need to mow the lawn either, spray poisons at the pests or fungicide on the spots on your rose leaves. No one tends the bush - yet it survives much better than cultivated plantations (except when humans interfere). All a garden needs is to be planted, fed occasionally and enjoyed.

This books shows you how.

Australians inherited their gardening traditions from last century Europe. It's a tradition of neat, dug gardens, fanatical elimination of weeds and preferably 20 gardeners to do all the work.

Most of the work we do in our gardens is unnecessary. It's also bad for the gardens. Digging is backbreaking - it also breaks down the soil strcuture so you get hard clumps, kills earthworms, soil bacteria, mycohorriza and other useful soil life.

You don't have to dig your garden- just use one of the non dig methods in chapter 1. You don't have to weed your garden either- learn to live with your weeds instead. (see chapter 2).

You don't have to water your garden every afternoon after work, or run up a bill for excess water (chapter3). You don't have to buy expensive and polluting pesticides - most pest control is unnecessary, as well as dangerous.

Everything grows together. Pumpkins climb up the avocado trees, strawberries ramble under the kiwifruit and limes, chokoes wander in the oranges, daisies poke through the lemon branches and there are wild parsnips and carrots and parsley coming up in the drive.

It's a mess. But it works.

I've tried to pattern my garden after the bush. There are no bare spaces, neatly dug - bare ground means weeds. The trees and shrubs are planted close together - they grow tall to reach the light; the birds eat the top fruit and I get the rest, hidden from the birds in the tangled branches. I rarely prune, except to hack back the growth - the fruit is small if you don't prune but you get more of it. It's better for the tree too.

Unfortunately we inherited our spring planting ideas from Europe - where you need to plant early to get a harvest. We don't here. We don't need bare soil between the rows either to maximise sunlight - our plants are better closely planted to maximise leaf cover to keep in moisture and built up carbon dioxide and keep down rampant weeds.

It's time we started working out Australian ways to grow things. Australian gardens needn't follow the European pattern. Let your vegetables wander under the shrubs - most will take some patchy shade. Grow flowers with your trees and your vegetables - they'll attract predators to keep down pests, but they're also fun. Have a lawn if you must - but remember that lawns needn't be grass, needn't be mowed - and can still be rolled on by kids and dogs and host the barbecue on Sunday afternoons.

Excellent food for thought.

The GM industry has always claimed that the advantage of herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops is that they lead to reduced herbicide use.

This is supposedly because as a GM crop grows, a farmer can spray the company's wide-spectrum herbicide that will kill all weeds but not the GM crop. Farmers can use just one type of herbicide rather than a mixture of herbicides. This would supposedly be better environmentally, and cheaper for the farmer.

But an examination of data from the US Department of Agriculture, shows that GM crops have led to increasing amounts of herbicide use over the years. Although the number of different types of herbicide used on a GM farm has reduced, the overall volume of herbicide has on average increased by 50 million pounds (weight) per year in the US.

A recent report from the Northwest Science and Environmental Policy Center confirms what many critics of GM have been saying for years. Wide-spectrum herbicides (in the US, Monsanto's glyphosate, or "Roundup" is the most common) lead to "Superweeds". Superweeds can arise through a number of ways: through selection pressure on weed populations; gene transfer from GM crops to wild relatives; or through "volunteers" of the crop appearing unwanted in following years. These weeds can therefore only be killed through increased dosages or by mixing in stronger herbicides. Thus the long-term effectiveness of herbicide-tolerant crops will always be limited.

It is possible that GM farmers are less aware of these facts because the increases in use have been incremental. In fact, for the first 2 to 3 years, herbicide use does decrease, and thus pleases farmers. But in the years following, the need for herbicide usage increases substantially. The effects of this has been hidden from the farmer because the cost of glyphosate has gone down over the years.

GM crops have been grown in the US for 8 years now, and so we can finally have a longer-term review of the effects and effectiveness of herbicide-tolerant crops. The results show that long-term, GM creates more problems than it solves.

Please visit http://www.biotech-info.net/highlights.html#technical_papers To download "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use in the United States: The First Eight Years".

Sorry, can't resist:

When I try to "pattern my garden", the avocado trees always seem to die out before getting big enough for the pumpkins to grow up. The limes never grow big enough to shade the strawberries. The daisies do poke through the lemon trees, but I wouldn't call them "branches" - more like twigs.

What am I doing wrong? The above mentioned trees tend to die out each year around October-November for some odd reason.

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Speaking of global warming.... We can't be worreid about bees and pesticides. We are to busy making believe with us impacting global warming.

Merrill, while you do raise some valid points, the gist of your comments are targetting agriculture. However, from what the letter writer said, "flower insecticide sprays, some animal flea prevention", it sounds like a bigger source of environmental problems are the city people with their manicured lawns and spraying with the attitude of, more is better and better safe than sorry (as far as applying sprays they don't understand for reasons they have no idea if they need or have).

I have to cover my nose every time I enter the gardening section of any store. It smells horrible there.

And this is the stuff people are putting on their lawns and gardens and think it's safe?

Great Topic! I was just discussing this the other day with someone. I too have many plants which attract butterflies and bees and I have seen very few this year. Something serious is certainly going on here.

The bee thing that Einstein discussed is extremely serious from what I understand, I have a friend in Hawaii who raises bees in order to help repopulate them. Interesting stuff.

Myth No.1 Weeds are bad guys.

Organic Control of Common Weeds http://www.jackiefrench.com/organweeds.html

Weed Myths

http://www.jackiefrench.com/organweeds.html

Myth No.1 Weeds are bad guys. http://www.jackiefrench.com/organweeds.html

Don't you watch the news on TV?

The disappearance of the bees isn't just a local problem. It's nationwide. In fact, the food growers in Calif. are worried, and have been having to bring bees in from bee keepers, because of the lack of them there. Although even the bee keepers have noticed a serious decline in the number of bees in their hives.

Look it up online.

I'm totally ignorant about the business (or hobby, for some) of bee-raising. So forgive my stupidity, but I'm curious whether it might help the bees recover their numbers if hive operators nationally would institute a "moratorium" that leaves the honey intact in the hives -- as opposed to taking honey out of the hives for human consumption.

Surely, bees stash honey in their hives for their own future consumption. Maybe it would help them get back on their feet again if we allowed these insects to have full access to all the food they've worked so hard to accumulate? And then, once the number of hives bounces back, then we return to harvesting their honey for our consumption.

Would this be a practical tactic?

riverat:

When beekeepers raise bees for their honey, they do things to increase honey production. They provide the hives, the frames with a honeycomb base, and even return the empty honeycomb to the hive after extracting the honey so the bees don't have to make the honeycomb again. They requeen when it's needed, pack the hives in straw and tarpaper or otherwise help them winter with minimal kill, keep vermin out of the hive. The beekeeper does much for the bees that helps the bees produce more honey than they need.

The vegans who don't eat honey for moral reasons are misguided. Without the beekeeper, the bees would not produce nearly as much.

The bees are not dying off because the beekeepers take too much honey.

This is a worldwide problem. A couple of studies showed a link between cell phones and bee die-off. It stands to reason the ever-increasing usage of pesticides would be a cause.

I was walking a baby around my neighborhood and smelled something weird, and after a few blocks recognized it as the smell that makes me dread going into the hardware store in summer: the pesticide aisle. I took the baby straight home. Poisoning the air and killing everything: it seems a lousy price to pay to get a lawn that looks like Astroturf.

Thanks, blackwalnut; that's all stuff I didn't know about beekeeping.

I can sure see where providing bees with hive boxes that have the honeycomb structures already in place would save the bees a tremendous amount of time and energy that frees them up to lay in much greater amounts of honey than they would if left to their own devices.

I guess this takes us back to the suspicion held by many, that the hive collapse syndrome is the result of the bees ingesting or contacting various herbicides and/or pesticides.

To those, I would add the possibility that the health of our bees (either directly, or during reproduction) might be affected negatively by encountering the pollens and nectars produced by genetically modified plants. The agribusiness industry, after all, keeps cranking out one new Frankenstein plant after another (always along with a new herbicide or pesticide product specifically tailored for use on the new plants).

In America at least, the companies doing this GM work and herbicide/pesticide tinkering have been using us human food consumers as their test dummies from the very beginning. Should we expect them to show any more concern regarding the effects their creations are having on insects that eat the same stuff?

"I've considered taking up beekeeping myself "

It wouldn't surprise me if Lawrence has some sort of law against keeping a beehive. Just like they have a law against having a natural yard. "Death to bees" could be their chant. But, actually, it's control - because they can and everyone lets them. Especially 'everyone' who truly believes as David Omar writes, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/jun...