The Organic Home Nursery

(Page 6 of 6)

March/April 1972
By Roberta A. Fanning 
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If you buy plants from a commercial nursery, transplant them into your own mix. Most will have received a water-soluble chemical fertilizer through a sprinkling system, so for the poor plants' immediate benefit, spray the foliage with a powdered kelp meal like Seaborn (sort of a methadone treatment to bring the addicts off gently).

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Put a dormant spray (lime-sulphur and oil, maybe) on apples in late February (in California) and prune them with hand shears. When the trees are in full blossom, spray them with Thuricide (a bacterial spore) to prevent the coddling moth from laying her eggs.

In California, the green lacewing is an effective means of controlling aphid and mite damage in the orchard. We use 10,000 egg cases a year . . . ladybugs fly back to the mountains and we end up releasing five or six thousand annually.

If you must use snail bait, Cory's—a metaldehyde—is relatively safe.

Don't try to compete with commercial nurseries for the holiday trade. Your Easter lilies will bloom in August and your Christmas cactus in April because you don't use force-bloom hormones. Needless to say, we sell live Christmas trees.

You can make good extra money starting vegetable seedlings (especially tomatoes) in the winter for sale in the spring. Here in California we start the seeds around January.

Be professional in your dealings. Too many farmers and businessmen that we know are reluctant to deal with organic distributors because they haven't proved to be reliable. Our own apple crop was all "contracted" to one natural food store this year . . . and they never showed.

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