Grow Your Own

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Tangy red tomatoes, butter peas, crisp lettuce, sweet onions, corn on the cob, watermelon that dripsoff the chin and other succulent goodies . . . fresh from your own garden. All pure, natural and organically grown.

It's a great dream - but where do you start? Especially if you were raised on concrete and have no handle on terms like "compost,""rock phosphate "and "ecological balance."

Well, we've all got to begin somewhere and Jeanie Darlington has written a great little book that is subtitled "An Introduction to Organic Gardening. " It is just that and MOTHER will be featuring sections from time to time.

Here, then, is the first installment of Grow Your Own.

I haven't been a mad gardener all my life. In fact, I really only began in the spring of `68 with a vegetable g arden. I had tended a small flower garden behind our flat in London, but this was my first real attempt. And it was the first whole summer Sandy and I had ever been in one place since we'd met 6 years before.

We moved into a cottage in Albany, California, just north of Berkeley, in August the year before. There was a nice size back yard full of dying roses, 3 foot tall grass and 35 year old fruit trees - apple, pear, apricot and plum. The house was all overgrown with vines and looked straight out of Hansel and Gretel so we left it that way. But we did cut the grass, prune the roses, and spray them and the fruit trees with some poison or other. It seemed like the right thing to do. We didn't do much else until the next spring when I decided I might try planting some tomatoes.

I was working at a nursery at the time, so I had plenty of knowledge about all the super fertilizers and magic bug killers. And I was pretty good at selling these to the customers. One spray company even paid the employees dividends each month according to how much of their product we sold. Naturally I pushed it. Fortunately, it was the least toxic spray we carried and was safe (?) to be used on vegetables within one day of harvest. It didn't contain DDT. But I wondered, 'If it kills all the bugs it says it does, how come one day will make it safe for me?'

Here's a sample weekly ad from the nursery:

We've got 'em . . . we've got the guns to murder your weeds, kill them so that they will lay off for awhile. Come in today and ask for a killer.

And then there were the combination chemical fertilizers, 0-10-10, 10-20-10, the numbers denoting the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash (NPK) content. The box told what the fertilizer was for, and that was that. Easy. But a few customers swore by manure and manure alone. How could this be?

Luckily, I happened to pick up from the floor one day an introductory offer to 10 months of Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine at half price. It dawned on me then, that I wanted to learn how to garden with natural fertilizers and without poisons. I could hardly wait to receive my first issue. With the offer, I was sent a handy pamphlet as well, called "Organic Fertilizing - Secret of Garden Experts." From then on, I was on the road to discovering about the mysteries of blood meal, ground rock phosphate, kelp meal and other such exotic sounding things. I had thought Organic Gardening was something weird old spinsters in Marin County did, like saving seed from year to year for the past 35 years and things like that.