4 THOR Se ASU DeUFE ONS aeaicl ae eens 
leaf produces. As a man who lives 
on the land, as a farm owner, as a 
gardener, what can I do, what can 
any gardener do, to minimize the 
threat, to lessen the damage, to 
the place where I live, the only 
place I can live, the earth? 
THE FARM is a special province. 
Ours happens to be two-thirds 
woodland, one-third arable land 
which we keep in grass, pasturage. 
If we grew corn or wheat or oats, 
the pressure ito use heavy doses of 
chemicals, to fertilize, to check 
weeds, to kill insects, would be 
difficult to resist. We voluntarily 
took our land out of such produc- 
tion, not for a subsidy — we don’t 
get one cent for it — but as a 
minor gesture toward a healthy 
environment. We wish enough 
pressure could be put on Congress 
to end farm subsidies that en- 
courage corporate farms which 
pour the chemicals onto the land 
to force huge crops from limited 
acreage and collect bonuses for 
their excess. 
BUT STANDING here by the 
garden fence in the April sun- 
light I am thinking more specific- 
ally of the millions of gardeners in 
this country, every one of them 
with a keener, more personal sense 
of the soil than any corporate farm- 
er. Gardeners garden because they 
like to grow things, because they 
get a sense of reality from ‘the soil, 
because they prefer home-grown 
vegetables. As a village gardener 
said to me at the hardware store 
the other day, “When I grow my 
own I as least know which poison 
is used on them.” 
SO HERE we are, millions of 
gardeners, trying to avoid those 
poisons, which are basic to too 
many pesticides and too many 
chemical fertilizers. If we are wise, 
we come as close to organic gar- 
dening as we can get, composting 
leaves and garbage waste, using 
cow manure, using lime when nec- 
essary, mulching, cultivating, giv- 
ing back to the soil as much or- 
ganic matter as we take from it. 
That is basic to healthy soil and 
for generations, till the tractor dis- 
placed the horse and the chemical 
fertilizer industry became a billion- 
dollar business, it was the common 
practice on the farms. The land 
would be far healthier if some de- 
gree of it were restored to the 
farms. 
ANYWAY, we try to restore and 
maintain the health of the soil in 
our gardens, and we use a mini- 
mum of chemical fertilizer. We 
think, from experience, tthat plants 
grown with chemicals are more 
susceptible to disease and insect 
attack than those grown in natur- 
ally rich soil. That is a theory, not 
an announcement. 
AND WE enlist all the help we 
can get in protecting our plants 
from insect pests. Not chemical 
help, which never kills all the pests, 
which allows those with a degree 
of tolerance to survive and repro- 
duce and in a few years creates 
new species of pests totally immune 
to the pesticide. This has happened 
again and again, but the pesticide 
people deny or ignore it, urging 
the use of more or stronger doses. 
DDT is a classic example. Another, 
