You know when I wrote yesterday, I forgot one of the most important things about gardening in the "old days"! Did we run down to the closest garden shop or to the closest hardware, etc. and get some kind of fancy, expensive fertilizer? No! Our cows were in the barns and in the barnyards, doing their thing which was furnishing us with plenty of good old manure!!Nothing like it to make theings grow! So it smelled bad for awhile but it didn't poison you if you ate the vegetables without thoroughly washing them!! Bugs? I don't remember too many tomato bugs or little or big things that ate up the leaves and sometimes the fruit and veggies! What happened here? We had plenty of bees, yellowjackets, wasps, etc. but in a way they were helpful for the pollenization of the fruits and veggies. We had worms, the kind that you could catch plenty of nice trout with in the creeks or rivers but what they did was keep the soil healthy!!!I remember about 10 years ago when my son Tom moved in with me, he loved to garden and keep the lawns nice, etc. This grass in front of my place lacks a lot of things, things that will make it green and healthy! Tom , however, bought a gadget that he would shove down in the grass to open up the root mass and then he bought bags of steer manure and spread it over all the lawns here in the apartment complex! The neighbors, a few of them complained but the grass started looking pretty thick and green!!!Since he passed away and the managers take care of it, it is looking terrible again!!! The gardener, poor old guy, sprinkles a few bags of some kind of "grass feed" on them and they don't do anything!!! This term "organic" really is the way to go!!! But the merchants have found a way to package "steer manure" to make a LOT of money and most people don't want to bother with it!! The old fashioned way of doing things was best for all concerned so what happened?????
