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Need That Gray Area

Rick Anderson is right is his comments about the fish issue.  We garden
writers need to better understand the gray and be a bit less black and white
on all environmental issues.
Some folks were upset that I included some chemicals in the new products
announcements.  The answer my friends is not simply saying "don't use any
chemicals"; such a rant rests on deaf ears among 90% of the population.
That is the mistake Rodale has made for 50 years.  I have known for years
that overseeding a lawn two years in a row and raising the lawn mower to 2.5
to 3 inches virtually eliminates all weeds and eliminates the need to ever
use an herbicide again.  Every time I give that speech, and I've given it
hundreds of times, the light bulbs go off and people come up to me afterward
thanking me for the good advice and assuring me that is what they are going
to now start doing.  Telling people how bad chemicals are for the
environment sure didn't dent the sales of Diazinon or Dursban for 30 years.
Telling people how to deal with problems in realistic and practical fashion
is the approach I prefer.  A hoe does not work very well in a lawn and corn
gluten is far too expensive to use on 10,000 square feet.  On top of that,
if the person doesn't overseed, he is using corn gluten forever; just
another drug habit in my view.  There are techniques to eliminate virtually
all problems currently dealt with by pesticides; chemical or natural.  The
very very difficult task for garden writers is to find enough avenues of
communication to get the information about those techniques out to the
general public.  We have not been very successful in my view.  As Rick
points out, one serious barrier for garden writers is that most ecological
issues are very complex and it takes time and much energy to truly learn
about the subtle aspects of each issue.  Most of us are not able to spend
that time so we use the knee jerk responses which don't make much change in
human behavior.  Books are still published, after 40 years, telling readers
to remove mulch if you want to minimize slugs.  How stupid can that be?
Books are still written advising homeowners to use landscape fabric to
prevent weeds.  How stupid is that?  Very few gardening books written in the
past 30 years give any true credit to the importance of building good soil
and maintaining good soil year in and year out.  Talk about overlooking the
obvious.
So enough of this rant.  I will continue publishing new product
announcements of products I know people are going to use and buy.  All of us
should learn the good side and the bad side of products just as we try to
learn about the good side and bad side of certain plants.  Then we should
help our readers understand how to achieve their goals without continuing to
screw up the ecological health of the planet.  Sometimes it takes a few
steps to get them from here to there.
So endeth the rant for today.

Jeff Ball

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