The Real Dirt
Photo credit: The Sun/Nanine Hartzenbusch
My inspiration for this week's garden column in The Sun came, in part, from reading Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food.Pollan makes the case for eating "real" food, food that has not been invented by marketing departments and is not made of 25 ingredients we don't recognize and can't pronounce.
He talks about the "Western diet," and how unhealthy it is, mostly because we are consuming highly processed fake foods that have no real relationship with the farm or the garden.
He also talks about the importance of soil - and that's what got me thinking about the dirt in our gardens and how to make it better.
Soil, Pollan writes, is part of our food chain.
"It follows that when the health of one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in it. If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk from them."
If you'd like to learn more about improving your soil, check out this new book from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Healthy Soils for Sustainable Gardens.
Comments
The post on our blog goes right along with yours. If you would like to take a look at it this is the URL:
http://marketingunscrambled-homeedition.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-is-your-soil-like-and-how-to-make.html
Posted by: Dan and Deanna | May 29, 2009 4:40 AM