Talking shit
It’s a busy time of year in the garden. There’s composting to do—emptying bins, filling bins up again, spreading the contents of the bins on the vegetable beds and around the fruit trees, working the stuff into the disgustingly heavy clay soil we endure in our garden to make it less water-retentive—and then there’s the planting of spring bulbs and harvesting of the last of the summer crops, those that haven’t succumbed to invading armies of slugs or the cruel fingers of frost.
I don’t like all the stuff that could be bracketed under ’seriously hefty lugging’ not because I’m lazy, but because it’s tough-going when there’s only one person able to get things done during weekdays, and because my balance problem really doesn’t like the jigging around that’s involved in using a spade for hours at a time.
tags: compost, compost toilets, crops, environment, farming, fruit trees, goats, green, hens, pigs, recycling, Rheas, shit, smallholdings, vegetablesCall for pesticide ban to save our honeybees
The Soil Association is calling on the UK government to ban pesticides implicated in the killing of honeybees. The pesticides under suspicion have already been banned in four other European countries. Of course anybody with a brain not motivated by greed and naked commercial interests knows that pesticides cannot act in accordance with the perceptual differences we put on lifeforms, between insects we declare to be ‘good’ and insects we declare to be ‘pests’. Pesticides are insecticides, meaning they kill insects. All insects. Including our little honey-making, crop-pollinating and utterly essential bees. Get enough of these poisons in your body and they’ll likely help hasten your own demise as well as destroying the fertility and viability of soil in the long-term. That’s the crux of the organic argument, and it’s true.
tags: bees, crops, honey, pesticides
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