Grow It

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SPECIAL NOTE. GROW IT! is a big book and even if a chunk this size were to be run in issue after issue after issue of MOTHER, it would take over two years to put the complete volume in your hands. If you haven't got two years to play around with, we recommend that you truck on down to your nearest book store and shell out $8.95 for your very own copy of GROW IT! That way, Richard Langer will be happy, Saturday Review Press will be happy ... and we're betting that you'll be happy too. It's a darn good book.

EXTRA SPECIAL NOTE: All material here reprinted from GROW IT! copy right a 1972 by Richard W. Langer.

At last! For the first time since the HAVE-MORE Plan was published way back in the 1940's, a fellow named Richard W. Langer has come up with a 365-page book that really introduces a beginner to small-scale farming. Wanna raise your own fruit, nuts, berries, vegetables, grain, chickens, pigs, ducks, geese and honeybees? GROW IT! tells you how to get started, we like it, and here's another chapter from the book.

nuts

He that plants trees loves others besides himself.x
-Old English Proverb

A nut tree is one of the most valuable things your homestead can have, not only for the high-protein fine winter stores and excellent eating the nutbowl will provide, but for its highly prized timber as well ... if it absolutely must be felled. The American chestnut is no more; the black walnut is not far behind in the race to extinction.

Walnuts are among the most valued of all temperate hardwoods, with a pair of good hundred-year-old trees worth more in dollars and cents than a whole furnished ready-to-move-into two-bedroom ranch house. The problem is it takes the tree that full hundred years to grow and only a couple of hours to fell it. There is some hope for the walnut, for people are beginning to wake up to the fact that even if they receive no direct benefit from a tree they plant, not even nuts for a dozen years or so, the world is that much better off for their having planted it. Granted there aren't too many people with this awareness yet ... but at least there's hope.

The American chestnut situation is a little different. The reason the village smithy no longer stands beneath its spread, the automobile notwithstanding, is simply that the species has been almost totally wiped out by blight, as has the majestic American elm.