A VISIT WITH MOTHER'S GARDENERS

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Here are a few tips on building healthy soil from two folks who make a full-time job of it.

STAFF PHOTOS

Master gardeners Kerry and Barbara Sullivan (with Peter Escher) welcome spring to MOTHER'S Eco-Village...

Here's Kerry fertilizing the beds where...

healthy double-dug rows.

marigolds will soon bloom beside the lettuce, and...

vitamin-rich greens will flourish in...

When news from our Ecological Research Center shows up in this magazine, it more often than not concerns some of our staffs technical endeavors (like the design and construction of the earth-sheltered house described on page 158) or our annual series of Show-Hows. But as those of you who've visited us know, the research going on at the Eco-Village takes any number of forms. And since this is the season when growers far and near are busily busting sod, hardening off seedlings, and—perhaps—even nibbling the year's first greens and radishes, we thought you might be interested in the doings of MOTHER'S gardeners, Kerry and Barbara Sullivan.

In only a few short years, the Sullivans have taken a piece of soil that hardly qualified as marginal and transformed it into a showplace . . . with carpets of flowers, and lush organically grown vegetables in groomed beds. But the gardeners rarely talk about their successes, since their primary concern is "the vast amount of work" they feel still needs to be done. And the focus of that labor is a constant effort to further improve the soil, because our master growers consider that medium the key to solving every potential garden problem.

Now almost everyone who's read articles about wholistic gardening has seen, over and over again, the statement that healthy plants are pest-resistant plants. However, when a plague of bean beetles or cabbage loopers chomps down on our own pampered (we think!) homegrown edibles, many of us suspect that this optimistic dictum may not always hold true! The brief history of MOTHER'S garden, though, already includes strong evidence that soil improvement can dramatically reduce insect damage.

Take flea beetles, for instance. The tiny black-bodied nibblers devoured the entire fall crop of mustard and turnip greens sown during the first months (August and September 1979) after Kerry and Barbara came to MOTHER. By the following spring, though, the soil had already been upgraded to the point that the greens were able—in effect—to outgrow the pests, and suffer only modest damage. And this past year, the garden suffered no flea beetle raids at all!

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