HOW TO MAKE COW MANURE...WITHOUT A COW!

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BUT IS IT WORTH IT?

And here's the really good news! My gardening experiments have convinced me that this artificial cow manure works at least as well in the vegetable patch as the real thing. In fact, I think it makes an even richer fertilizer and here's my reasoning:

A cow's digestive system—obviously—is designed to extract as many nutrients for the cow as possible from the mass of organic material which passes through it and eventually is expelled as manure. My plastic bag "digestive system", by contrast, turns everything that it contains (except for the few gases which escape) directly into "manure" . . . with no food values extracted.

And here's an added bonus: It's just one whale of a lot easier to make this artificial manure than it is to produce ordinary compost!

PROOF OF THE "PUDDING"

Furthermore, I know my ersatz manure can do the job in the garden. On May 25, 1977—for instance—I dug holes (four feet apart) for a row of Burpee's Golden Zucchini squash and a row of Straight Eight cucumbers. One large shovelful of the fertilizer was thoroughly mixed into the soil in each excavation and about five seeds were planted in every hill.

Once the seeds had sprouted and the plants were large enough to mulch, I tilled around them, laid down several layers of newspaper, and covered the paper with approximately six inches of hay. And that's about all the attention the squash and cucumbers got, except for normal watering.

Now I won't say that those plants jumped out of the ground . . . but they did grow amazingly fast (fast enough to convince me that no other fertilizer was necessary). Since this was a test, we held off gathering any of the burgeoning harvest as long as we could . . . but, by August 10, it was apparent that we'd better start picking the experimental vines fast while we still had a chance of keeping,ahead.

Squash, squash, squash! I'd never seen anything like those plants in my garden before. We ate, cooked, dried, canned, pickled, and gave away (even to the mailman!) more squash than I'd even guessed one row could produce. l began telling my wife that the only way to stop those vines from bearing was to pull them up! We finished the summer feeding squash to the chickens (the flock loved them).

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