DIRT IS GOOD FOR YOU
I was having a rough day when I just happened to find this piece in the New York Times: <http://http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?scp=1&sq=eat%20dirt&st=cse. > The article outlines the growing body of scientific research indicating that eating or breathing in dirt as a child helps build the human immune system.
Of course, there’s a big “DUH” factor involved here. Human beings evolved for millions of years in an environment full of dirt, so it should come as no surprise that our bodies have incorporated its presence into their systems. However, it’s also true that our modern civilization has a pushes the idea that we are better and healthier now that we live in a “clean” world. Our civilization to me now seems obsessed with sterility. Artificial surfaces made with toxic chemicals — such as asphalt and plastic — are seen as “clean”. Natural substances such as mud and dust are seen as “dirty”. Humans cannot survive in a truly sterile environment any more than can the bacteria around us — bacteria which also make up a large percentage of the weight of our bodies.
The food safety industry is one of the biggest culprits in pushing fear of dirt on the public, and the recent outbreak of salmonella in peanuts is bringing them back into the spotlight once again. They have schemes for irradiation, pasteurization, and other (patented, of course) technologies that would make our food safer — while making a tidy profit for the companies who control the technology. I’d like to see a study of the correlation between documented “dirt eaters” and food borne illnesses. Because despite all the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year in our country to try to prevent food poisoning, the problem seems to be getting worse. Maybe there are too few kids who never get their hands dirty…
PLAYING WITH DIRT
It’s that time of year again, and here at TFF we have fired up the greenhouse and started dropping seeds into seed flats. On Thursday and Friday, the crew filled up about 500 plastic trays with potting soil and planted tomatoes, watermelons, and melons. We use a vacuum seeder for the tomatoes, and do the rest by hand (bigger seeds). Next stop is the incubation chamber, an insulated wooden closet with electric heaters inside. The seed flats get stacked inside and then heated up to 80 degrees for 60 hours or so. This “pops” or germinates the seeds quickly in a small space, and reduces our energy usage.
Once the seeds are “popped”, they get unstacked and moved onto tables in the larger greenhouse. If it’s warm and sunny during the day, we won’t have to run the heaters in the house at all during the day. At night, the heaters will keep the house at about 65 degrees. Under this regime, we hope to have the plants emerge from the soil in a week or ten days.
If the weather cooperates, the tomato and melon plants should be ready by the end of March. If it turns cold and rainy, we’ll have to crank up the heaters during the day and the plants will take an extra week or two. But that’s okay, since wet weather will slow down our work to get the fields ready.
One of our biggest problems in the greenhouse the last few years has been rodents, who seem to really appreciate the fields of tomato and melon “sprouts” that we are growing for them. Our response to this problem has been pretty dramatic — one mouse can eat thousands of tiny plants in just a few days: We built chicken wire cages to enclose about 500 plant trays. By the end of February, weeds and grasses outside the greenhouse start to sprout and the mice stop bothering us, so later plantings of summer crops don’t need the same level of protection.
Our other big pests in our greenhouses are slugs and snails. Unlike in gardens in the SF Bay area, where these slimy critters are a problem all year, they only affect us during cold, wet periods. Come April, the greenhouses are way too hot for the mollusks to tolerate. But this time of year, a single slug can slurp its way across dozens of seed flats in a night, leaving a trail of destruction and still hiding itself away well before sunrise. The most effective way we have found to deal with slugs may be familiar to you if you have them in your garden: pre-dawn patrols to pick them off the plants and drown them in a bucket. During peak periods of rainy weather, we have caught as many as 50 slugs in a single night!
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