It's Organic!!!

Let me tell you about organic.

Organic is something that is grown without chemical boosts, hormones, fertilizers, or DNA additives. Organic uses natural fertilizers. Organic is less expensive, not more expensive, than using hybridized seeds and supersized fertilizers. Organic is using year old horse poop to ensure that all of the impurities and harsh nitrogen and acids inherent in that horse poop are dissolved away by exposure to the sun and atmospheres. Organic isn't pure and sweet and nice and clean in pretty packages - it is simple down to the dirt productivity.

I know. I've been growing organic for years. I use a mixture of chili powder and vegetable oil on my plants to keep deer and insects away. I spray listerine around the porch to keep away mosquitoes; lemon dish soap and lemon ammonia mixed to keep away the flies. I use old horse poop for fertilizer, sometimes chicken poop (not too much - it burns too) and next year I am going to start to use rabbit poop, because I want rabbits to populate my new bigger greenhouse to provide the Co2 needed for greening up in the wintertime. Rabbit poop doesn't burn plants, and rabbits have other benefits like meat and fur. (Did a mental picture of Bugs Bunny just pop into your head? "Hassenpfeffer"?) Heirloom seeds, collected from heirloom plants, that are not hybridized, or genetically coupled with Roundup to keep weeds away, or genetically spliced with animal DNA to keep the produce fresher in the stores. did you know that Monsanto - the proud producers of those genetically altered and Roundup-enhanced seeds, test every cow that is slaughtered in the US now (with your friendly government's wholehearted support) to check to see what animals have been fed their 'enhanced' products - and if the animal tests positive, and the producer is not on their 'feed list', Monsanto sends the producer a bill for using their enhanced product? They actually bill them for poisoning you. Ooops, sorry, it isn't poison - it is enhanced productivity. My bad.

Can't wait to put in my chickens again. Next year, the chicken coop will be right next to the garden, with a "chicken moat" - a wire run - built all the way around the garden. This will keep the bugs out of the garden - and my chickens will be free-range. Do you know what that really means? They will be sleeping in dust bowls, scratching in dirt, nesting in wooden boxes in a coop when they stroll into it. Their eggs will have chicken poop on them. They will have good solid legs to run around on - because unlike the chicken you ate this week, they won't be stuffed into metal buildings so tightly that they cannot move, shot up with hormones and antibiotics, forcefed whatever the Ag companies say is the fastest producing feed, while their eggs drop unrecognized into long tubes and are rolled away.

As prices continue to rise, as fruits and vegetables and meats are continually being grown elsewhere and shipped thousands of miles, using more and more of that expensive gasoline, I think about my friends in homes in tracts where they cannot grow their own food, where the chickens and gardens are ordinanced out, and think about what is really going to happen to them. Daily I watch the trucks going down the highway, shipping huge loads of open-range fed Angus cattle to who knows where - usually to feed lots where they fatten them up for six to eight weeks on the high hormones and vitamin supplements and massive doses of antibiotics - and I wonder what is going to happen to folks when the shipments stop. Will they still be demanding the overpriced and overemphasized 'organic' meat - or will they, as some did in the '80's, be fighting over the last three cuts of green mouldering beef in the grocer's freezer? Will they walk thru Wal Mart whining that there are no grapes from Chile or bananas from Honduras or cheap seafood (grown in filthy ponds) from China? Will Whole Foods still be in business - or will their 'grants' to and supervision of their organic suppliers slow and stop, because it just gets too expensive and people stop buying?

Scuze me. I've got a pickup truck full of last year's horse poop from the barn that has to be worked into the soil for the fall crop of cole crops and peas. Gotta get to work.