But I have, this past year, made an effort to examine with a more critical eye, the world I live in, and to broaden my understanding of what I've come to term as man's ambitious agenda in the 20th century to trade health and safety for simplicity and ease. For years I considered myself too busy to acquire more than an awareness of the danger of chemicals, pesticides, and antibiotics found in foods and topical agents I applied daily to my skin.
Not anymore. Not when I can finally say with some learnedness, that there is a real danger in consuming any products containing even trace amounts of antibiotics, chemicals, and estrogen that have the potential to create inflammation in my body, and in the bodies of those I love and care about. I'm talking about how Cancer grows.
Anticancer, A New Way of Life, by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, is a book we must all read. NOW. David, is a brain-cancer survivor.
His book has encouraged and empowered me to persevere in the garden beds we built and planted back in April that have since come under weekly attack by pesky ants, aphids, earwigs, woodlice, beetles, and all the rest I don't yet know the names of.
When the mice made their debut in June and July to thank me for such an abundant bounty by eating nearly every blooming flower and seed that was growing with the promise of becoming an organic fruit or vegetable, I considered for weeks what Daddy might say, 3 raised beds, and nearly a thousand dollars later (and a few baskets of tomatoes to show for it), if I told him I wasn't cut out for farming after all.
It was blatantly clear to me (okay, all of us) by August that every painstaking effort to grow anything would be continuously sabotaged by the forces of nature, unless of course, one considered the unfriendly environmental commitment to pesticides.
I couldn't. Because Taco, our little Americana, was counting on me to keep her environment safe. So were her little sisters.
2 comments:
Gardening gets easier the more you do it. Companion planting, Neem oil, soap sprays - there are many natural, non-harmful ways of protecting our bounty.
Or, look into edible forest gardens. You are on a wondrous path, just stumbling on some rocks.
Based on your recommendation, I requested this book from the library. Robert tried a garden here the first year, which yielded about three tomatoes. The second year, however, was a bit better, also providing green peppers, jalapenos, spices. Our saboteurs are larger (deer, raccoons, etc.), making them a little easier to deter.
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