I grew up in an apartment in Manhattan, so anything green seemed natural to me. It’s only much more recently that I’ve come to see lawns as man-made objects imposed on the environment—often an unforgiving and unreceptive environment.

Then Eric Vinge of Planet Natural asked me to write an article on organic lawn care. Writing that article (A Home-Owner’s Guide to Organic Lawn Care: Maintaining a Chemical-Free Lawn) was my education in lawn-care pesticides and other chemicals, and it was quite a class. Obviously, I started with a strong bias towards the organic point of view. But I have a strong skeptical streak, and I decided to trace every claim about rising cancer rates and endocrine disruption, about tracked-in chemicals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and the rest to either a university or a government study.

You know what I found? It was all true. All those claims about contaminated well-water and streams, the danger of childhood exposure, reproductive disorders—they’re all true.

This show is an attempt to share some of what I learned.

Next week’s interview with Evelyn Hadden, author of Beautiful No-Mow Lawns: 50 amazing lawn alternatives, provides lots of information about what you can have instead of grass—including a terrific conversation about providing play possiblities for children.

Both of this week’s guests  came to their environmental work on lawns via personal experiences. In the case of Paul Tukey it was the headaches, nausea, and other ailments that started afflicting him every spring after years working as a lawn-care professional. Cristina Milesi‘s story is less dramatic but no less telling. Italian by birth, she arrived in Missoula, Montana for graduate school, looked at the brown hills above the green lawns of the town, and said, Something’s not right here.

Both guests have become serious advocates of reform in lawns. Paul and I spend some time talking about 2,4-D, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and one of the two key ingredients in the defoliant Agent Orange. Paul tells the story of Dr. June Irwin, the

 - author, lecturer, activist, film-maker, T.V. show host
- 2006 winner of American Horticultural Society’s Horticultural Communication Award for lifetime achievement.
Website: paultukey.com
Blog: SafeLawns.blog Daily Q & A
Books:

• The Organic Lawn-Care Manual: A Natural, Low-Maintenance System for a Safe, Beautiful Lawn, 2007
• Tag, Toss & Run: 40 Classic Lawn Games co-authored with Victoria Rowell, 2012

    Videos, movies

• People, Places & Plants – HGTV television show, 2003-2007—DVD set available on Paul’s website.
• “Making the Organic Lawn Care Transition,” 2007—a series of brief videos available free on the SafeLawn.org website as How-To Videos.
  A Chemical Reaction, 2009—the story of Dr. June Irwin’s successful 6-year campaign to get her town to ban the cosmetic use of lawn pesticides and herbicides. In 1991, Hudson, Quebec became the first town in North America to enact such a ban.

– Senior Research Scientist, University of California at Monterey Bay, NASA Ames Research Center
– member of the NASA Climate Science Adaptation Investigators team
   Website: Ecocast
   Selected articles and presentations*
“Regional Climate Pojections: What the Science Says” —presentation for Association of Women in Water, Energy and Environment, May 2011
- looks like power point, but downloadable as PDF
- lots of useful (and scary) graphs, maps, etc.
“Mapping and modeling the biogeochemical cycling of turf grasses in the United States” Milesi, C. et al. 2005.  Journal of Environmental Management. Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 426–438.
- This is the article that led to interviews and/or articles in everything from Forbes to U.S.News.
“Assessing the Extent of Urban Irrigated Areas in the United States” Milesi, C. et al. 2009. Chapter 8 in Remote Sensing of Global Croplands for Food Security, ed. Prasad Thenkabail et al.

“Looking for Lawns” by Rebecca Lindsey, Nov. 8 2005, feature article about Milesi’s work on NASA’s Earth Observatory site.
- Cristina recommended this article to me as the best overview of her work for the lay reader.
“Study: A Link Between Pesticides and ADHD.” By Alice Park. Time Monday, May 17, 2010.
“Pesticides Linked to ADHD in Children” Environmental Protection Blog Posted by Laura Williams on Sep 13, 2011.

*Very selected.

source: http://atinadiffley.com/bio/

This is a conversation with Atina Diffley about the loss of one organic farm to development and the fight to protect its replacement from an oil pipeline. She talks about the ecological damage and spiritual wounds she, her children, their father, and his family farm suffered when The Gardens of Eagen went piecemeal under the bulldozer. Then she describes how she took on the Koch brothers and won. Her memoir Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works came out this spring.

I owe this interview to one of my oldest friends, who works at the food co-op The Wedge in Minneapolis, or perhaps to her boyfriend, who edits the food section of a local paper. When Antonio told Sally about the book, Sally promptly called me. (If I had all the right feeds set up, I’d already have known about it, but oh well.)

Sally has been celebrated elsewhere in these pages as a terrific cook, and while her skill deserves most of the credit, some of it goes to the ingredients, which come almost exclusively from the Wedge. That’s fitting; the Diffleys had sold food to the Wedge (and several other Twin Cities co-ops) for decades, and it was the Wedge that bought the Gardens of Eagen from the Diffleys in 2007. (Call the store on Tuesdays, and it will probably be Sally who answers the phone.)

After Sally’s tip, I looked up the book and its author. Later that day, I called Atina. I’ll never be sorry.

When Atina partnered with Martin Diffley—in life and in farming—on his family farm south of the Twin Cities, they already knew that the land would eventually be sold and developed. But that knowledge did not begin to prepare them for the experience itself.

Reading Atina’s book, or (I hope) listening to this interview, is somewhat similar: we all know that the U.S. is losing the family farm; we’ve seen the movies with the farm auctions; but hear the process described by someone who has lived through it—well, that’s different. Listening to Atina describe how machines tore up trees, leveled hills, and emptied the landscape of wildlife is actually painful.

Yet her voice remains quiet, which somehow makes the story more poignant. Perhaps even more amazing, she has kept her sense of humor. She laughs wryly as she describes how her son started smashing watermelons and chucking potatoes at customers, as encroaching development gradually restricted his scope to the farmstand.

But she’s not laughing when she interprets this violence as the way the boy acted out the violence that was being inflicted on the land. Nor does she laugh when she describes her daughter’s very different reaction.

“She showed all the classic symptoms of a rape victim,” Atina tells me. Her daughter withdrew, rarely leaving the house, which she cleaned obsessively.

This is perhaps the hardest thing a parent can experience: her own inability to protect her children.

The loss of the first farm, and the emotional toll it exacts, makes the assault on the second farm that much more intolerable. Not again, we think. Surely it can’t happen again.

In both crises, the fact that the farms were organic was central, and Atina does a marvelous job of explaining why. For instance, instead of planting fencepost to fencepost, as do many conventional farms, the Diffleys typically have less than half their land planted to vegetables. The rest is in cover crops, or in permanent, diverse plantings: meadow, woods, or riparian areas. Together, these make up the complete eco-system on which the organic farm depends. And as Atina makes clear, that system was destroyed long before the bulldozers rumbled onto the last field.

She’s equally eloquent in explaining why the mitigation plan in place when the pipeline was proposed did not begin to meet the needs of an organic farm. And in describing her belated discovery that she was herself the expert in organic farming whom she needed during the legal battle. And in her tributes to the community that supported her and Martin through those months.

Near the end of the interview, Atina asserts that this story is in part her gift to young women, a testament to their power.

She herself had been in an earlier, abusive marriage, and had watched her self-esteem erode almost to nothing. To come back from that—to discover her power, to recover her self—that was everything.

It’s a remarkable story, told by a remarkable woman.

from leereich.com

Either he knows a lot about gardening, or he’s a whiz at Photoshop. I’m betting on the first, which is why I interviewed him for this week’s podcast, The Weed-Free Garden.

Lee has a four-part system for beating the weeds:

•    – Don’t disturb the soil. (prevents buried weed seeds from surfacing and germinating.)
•    – Set up permanent beds and paths. (so you won’t have to till to aerate the soil.)
•    – Keep the soil covered at all times. (so weeds can’t get established.)
•    – Use drip irrigation where irrigation is needed. (prevents disease in a densely planted bed, saves water, and puts the water where it’s needed: in the root zone.)

During the interview, Lee explained how each of these precepts grows from the ones before, how each benefits soil and plants, and how to manage them.

This last is a darned important area, because a lot of people (me, for instance) will wonder how in heaven’s name you can add air, amendments or fertilizer without digging. Lee advocates an entirely top-down approach to these. An organic mulch will feed worms and other soil organisms (not to mention plant roots), which aerate soil. The right mulch also serves as fertilizer and amendment.

So Lee mulches with a half-inch of compost a year. That’s it. And he plants intensively—several crops per bed, per year.

But my favorite piece of advice from Lee is this one: if you can’t resist digging, set aside a 2′ by 2′ plot, and dig your heart out there. Just don’t inflict this nonsense on your plant beds!

After getting a PhD in horticulture at Maryland, Lee Reich started his professional career as a researcher with Cornell and the USDA, but he has long since given that up to become a writer, lecturer, and “avid farmdener”—what he describes as more than a gardener, less than a farmer.

He has written numerous books, including Weedless Gardening, the basis for this week’s show, and most recently, The Pruning Book. You can get signed copies by ordering on his website! He blogs at In Lee’s Garden.

John Traunfeld, Extension Specialist & Master Gardener Program Director at the University of Maryland. He has several YouTube videos, including one  on No-Till Gardening, demonstrating an easy way to kill turf and start a garden, all in the same season. When I called him about this, he said he’d gotten the method from Lee Reich.

No-Dig Vegetable Garden– very useful site.

The Weed-Free Garden

]]> http://themanicgardener.com/2012/04/the-nearly-weed-free-garden-podcast-30.html/feed 2 http://themanicgardener.com/2012/04/more-space-than-you-thought-podcast-29.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=more-space-than-you-thought-podcast-29 http://themanicgardener.com/2012/04/more-space-than-you-thought-podcast-29.html#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:37:33 +0000 The Manic Gardener http://themanicgardener.com/?p=984 Continue reading →]]>  

Fern Richardson grows “tons of herbs,” “tons of succulents,” lots of vegetables, and at least six trees—on a balcony. I’m not quite sure of the tree count, because after I counted to six, I’m afraid my hearing did the auditory equivalent of glazing over—I just wasn’t entirely functional for a moment there.

When she was listing them—the kumquat, the apricot, the fig, the two apple trees—I squawked “TWO?” so loudly that I had to lower the volume of that one word in the recording, to preserve my listeners’ hearing. There are two, Fern quite reasonably replied, because apple trees cross-pollinate with a nearby tree of a different variety.

I know this, of course, but still—two apple trees on a balcony? And lest you envision some Hollywood terrace big enough for a swimming pool, let me give you the exact dimensions of Fern’s garden space: four feet by ten. (4’ x 10’)

She’s an expert at getting the most out of a teeny tiny space, and she shares her knowledge with me on this week’s podcast. She’s just published her first book, the wonderful Small-Space Container Gardens: Transform Your Balcony, Porch, or Patio with Fruits, Flowers, Foliage & Herbs. We talk about the special challenges faced by people who garden in tiny spaces—wind, glaring sun, perpetual shadow, and of course, the lack of space. She has not one but at least three or four suggestions about how to use a wall or railing as garden space, and a similar range of ideas about creating vertical walls for privacy, wind barriers, or simple loveliness.

We had a few good laughs doing this show, and I actually told the story of how I once dealt with a cell-phone caller on a train. Fern’s chimes and fountains are a less aggressive shield against unwanted noise, though apparently she’s not afraid to push the envelope; some of her gardening tactics may not be entirely in accordance with her condo’s HOA rules.

Fern’s book left me feeling that there were endless possibilities for even the smallest gardening space—and that’s how I hope you feel after listening to the show.

Guest & Links

Fern Richardson gardens in Orange County, California on a 4’ x 10’ balcony. Her award-winning blog, Life on the Balcony, includes even more projects than appear in her book, along with lots of informative articles. That book Small-Space Container Gardens: Transform Your Balcony, Porch, or Patio with Fruits, Flowers, Foliage & Herbs, was just published by Timber Press.

It has been a wild and wooly week in the world of research here at the Manic. Since I’m researching for my WWII book as well as my podcasts, I go careening from nitrous oxide emissions from manure to a history of blood transfusions. (Did you know that the first successful transfusions to humans occurred in 1667 and involved blood from sheep? Neither did I.)

Of course, since my only source for that fact is a single internet document, I shouldn’t call it a fact at all. Yet. I used to give freshmen students an assignment in which they had to find the real source of a quotation or document that’s commonly misattributed. My favorite was what’s known as “The Sunscreen Song,” (Remember that? It had some great lines: “Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.” and “Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.”) *

So there I was, blithely researching studies about whether our fresh foods contain fewer nutrients than they used to, and this quotation kept popping up:

“The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us – no matter how much of them we eat.”

Sometimes there was more, either before or after, but that sentence was always there. It turned up on various organic sites and proved particularly popular with sites selling various supplements. Most uses were followed by this citation: U.S. Senate Document No. 264, 1936. Usually the quotation appeared as an epigraph, set off from the main text of a page, as on the cover sheet of this extremely reliable-looking document put out by the extremely official-sounding “Nutrition Security Institute:”

Sometimes, though, there’d be something like this: “Even back in 1936 our government was worried about…”** Being the obsessive skeptic that I am, I wanted to see this U.S. Senate document 264, 1936 for myself. And I wanted to see the quotation in context. So I went to a digital record of government documents and tried to find that one. I can therefore report, with some authority, that the only thing worse than plowing through government documents in their hard copies is plowing through their virtual versions.

My husband of course received frequent updates on my progress or lack thereof, and pointed out several times that the fact that this thing appeared as a senate document didn’t mean anything; any senator could enter anything into the record.

How right he was. Eventually I found myself staring at a pdf of the actual Senate document, old-fashioned type-face and all, and do you know what it came from? A Cosmopolitan article. By a Rex Beach, who had become enamored of, and therefore reported about, the agricultural practices of Dr Charles Northern, who strove to raise the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables by adding “colloidal minerals” to the soil.

It was entered into the record by one Mr. Feltcher (Senator Duncan Fletcher, Democrat of Florida), but to read many a vitamin vendor, it was produced by the Senate itself as an official government study and report. My favorite is the site that actually reverses the sources, first correctly ascribing several quotations to the Cosmopolitan article, but then adding that “Most likely the above mentioned article was based on the following document: Senate Document No. 264, 1936.” This sort of thing makes me want to beat my head against the wall.

Senate Document No. 264, 1936, has been debunked more than once: in 2007, Ed Zimney, MD, published “Senate Document #264 debunked,” and in “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie: The Jig May Be Up,” Donald Davis of U. Texas (retired) takes on Joel D. Wallach, who twists that document, and statistics, to promote his mineral supplement.

Now, all this says nothing about the value or veracity of the claims made in “Modern Miracle Men” itself (though they’re a bit on the wild side, and entirely anecdotal), but it does undermine the value and veracity of the many contemporary organizations and companies that quote it and append that U.S Senate Document citation, thus suggesting that the quotation is part of an official government study and report.

As it turned out, all my earnest searching of Senate documents was unnecessary. To find out where Senate Document No. 264 comes from, all you have to do is google the sentence I quoted. So I wonder: does the Nutrition Security Institute not know about Beach’s article? Or don’t they care?

_____________________________________________

* If you Google “sunscreen song” now, you’ll get the whole story, but ten years ago, you’d probably see the claim that it was a commencement address given by Kurt Vonnegut. Next you’d learn that Baz Luhrmann had produced the song, (“Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” (itself a play on Quindon Tarver’s “Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good)”) but back then you had to really dig to find that the original text came from a 1997 column by Mary Schmidt. She called it “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young,” but what does she know; she just wrote it.

**  Here is one example, which begins thus:

“In 1936 the United States Senate issued Document 264 relating to proper food mineral balances presented by Mr. Fletcher.”

Apart from the awful writing, there’s the minor fact that the Senate did not precisely issue Document 264; it allowed an article to be entered into the record, and labeled it #264. Interestingly, this site ends its excerpts with a reference to Reader’s Digest (?), and then you get this:

For quality Ionic Life Transfusion Liquid Minerals online
Life Transfusion Ionic Liquid Minerals

Or Call toll free 1-866-605-0420

Huh. So That’s what it’s all about. Life Transfusion Liquid Minerals. It figures.

Enter polyculture, which turns its back not only on rows, but on the whole idea of a vegetable garden at all. Not that you shouldn’t grow vegetables, but in a polyculture, they’ll be mixed up together, and there may well be herbs and flowers in the mix as well.

David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth have just published What’s Wrong With My Vegetable Garden?: 100% Organic Solutions for All Your Vegetables, from Artichokes to Zucchini. For them, as for many organic gardeners, half the solution lies in prevention, and a key to prevention is polyculture. When they talk about putting the right plant in the right place, they mean not just giving it the soil, light, and water that it needs, but the growing companions as well.

For the show, David and Kathryn describe a number of possible polyculture combinations, such as slipping asparagus into a perennial flower garden or using melons instead of squash in the Three Sisters combination traditional with so many Native American tribes: corn, pole beans, and squash. They suggest planting radish with carrots, as pulling the radish will help loosen the soil around the slow-growing carrots.

It became clear in the course of this interview that I need to know my plant families better. One rule of thumb David recommended was to mix a member of the daisy, carrot, and mint families into every bed. His example was to bring chamomile, (from the daisy family), cilantro (carrot) and basil (mint) into a tomato bed, along with beans. Well, I’d never thought about what families those herbs belonged to, and the cilantro and basil IDs took me by surprise. Of course, the Latin names would have helped. If I knew them.

This show covered so much that when I try to describe it I tend to go on and on. The practical combinations I’ve dwelt on made up the middle portion of the show, which started with an overview of polyculture and ended with some tips about dealing with pests and problems in an organic way.

I already plant basil and carrots in my tomato beds (also early lettuce); beans I shall have to try. Polyculture may be the last nail in the coffin of the old kitchen garden.

David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth garden in Port Townsend, Washington,  where they have mostly cool, coastal weather. However, they have also lived and gardened in Hawaii and New Mexico, so they know their way around several different gardening zones.

What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?): A Visual Guide to Easy Diagnosis and Organic Remedies. Timber Press, 2009.

What’s Wrong With My Vegetable Garden?: 100% Organic Solutions for All Your Vegetables, from Artichokes to Zucchini. Timber Press, 2011.

“Sustainable Solutions, ” Chapter 1 in The New American Landscape: Leading Voices on the Future of Sustainable Gardening, Edited by Thomas Christopher. Timber Press, 2011.

The manure problems—pollution and contamination—that I reviewed in my last post occupy the first part of this podcast, and if that were all we covered, you too might be inclined to crawl under your desk and stay there.

A quick recap: Rather to the surprise of many an organic gardener, even organic manures can cause problems: phosphorus can contaminate surface water, while nitrogen can leak into ground water and can also form nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas almost 300 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.

Not to mention the metals and pharmaceuticals in conventional manures.

Fortunately, my guest Frank Larney is able to propose almost ludicrously simple solutions for many of these problems. What’s complicated, it turns out, is the economics, and what’s difficult is making these simple solutions—composting manure, turning it into the soil, using less in some places and more in others—economically viable.

Frank Larney, Soil scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada, in Lethbridge, Alberta.

An expert in soil conservation, Frank has worked with animal feed operations, holds seminars around the continent on composting manures and other sustainable practices.

Larney, F., Xiying Hao, and Edward Topp. “Manure Management.” Ch 16 of Soil Mangement: Building a Stable Base for Agriculture. Hatfield, Jerry L. & Thomas J Sauer, Eds.

Larney,F. & H. Henry Janzen. “Use of Manure for Restoring Soil Productivity,” from the province of Alberta’s Manure Management Update 2011 conference. Can be downloaded in PDF form as both an article and a power-point presentation.

Air Emissions from Animal Feeding Operations: Current Knowledge, Future Needs. Ad Hoc committee on Air Emissions from Animal Feeding Operations, Committee on Animal Nutrition, National Research Council. National Academy of Sciences, 2003.

Imagine me in my desk chair, googling away about manures, at the start of my relationship with the theoretical version. Here’s what I found.

First there were the hormones animals are given to make them grow faster or produce more milk. (Remember rBGH and the fight to require that milk be labeled if it came from treated cows? No? Well, maybe that’s because we lost the fight.)

Then there were the antibiotics, which both prevent disease and also speed growth. (Who’d a thunk it?) In fact, 70% of the antibiotics used in the United States are used on animals, most of them on animals that are not sick. But hey, we’re Americans: we want things big, we want them fast, so when it comes to beef cattle, we want them to get big fast. And as far as I can tell, in this area Americans and Canadians have pretty much moved in lockstep.

Europeans somehow manage without most of this stuff, something to bear in mind when you hear that it’s “necessary.”

Okay, so I learned about the antibiotics and hormones and slumped a bit in my seat. What did this mean for my belief that manure was great for soil and for the future of not just organic gardening, but for organic farming as well?

Well, (and here I sat up straighter) those nasty things can be avoided if one chooses organic manures. Not that antibiotics and hormones are the only pharmaceuticals used on cattle; there are also anti-histamines, anti-parasitics, and anti-inflammatories, both steroidal and non.

This discovery led to a major curvature of the spine. I mean, whether or not whether or not some manure is free of such junk, this is depressing news.

Still—I needed hang onto one fact: the pharmaceuticals could be avoided, and at length perhaps banned. Time to stiffen the upper lip and the spine.

But google had not finished with me: there was more bad news. Leaning back in my chair and eyeing the screen sideways, I read on.

There were pathogens, including E.coli and salmonella, in some manures. As for the nutrients themselves, part of what makes manure so wonderful, even these caused problems: the nitrogen can contaminate both ground water and air, and the phosphorus can contaminates surface water, contributing to algae blooms that use up all the available oxygen, killing off everything else that’s there—oysters, fish, whatever.

By now I couldn’t see the screen, I’d sunk so low. And here’s the final blow, the one that sent me sliding right off my chair:

These are natural parts of manures. So even the organic versions will cause these problems. Meaning that even they can contribute to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. When I wrote about that particular devastation almost four years ago, I titled the post “News Flash: Synthetic Fertilizers Contribute to Global Warming–another reason to go organic.” Well, apparently it’s not quite that simple.

At this point I considered just living under my desk, accepting donations from passing strangers.

Which is about where things stood (or huddled) when I decided to do a podcast on the issue.

Back in early February, I ended a podcast on Water-Wise Gardening with a short interview with Edwin Beck, who helped design the EarthMinded RainStation, so of course I mentioned both him and it in the parallel post. But I discovered I had way too much to say on the topic for that post, so here’s the rest.

First, I’d better say that this isn’t really a full-fledged product review, as I haven’t used the things myself. (Yet.) But it’s such a whole-hearted endorsement that I feel compelled to add that no, I’m not getting paid to do this. (I won’t endorse a product for a price, period.) But while I’m being upfront and center, I’d better be thorough about it and admit that people whom I feature in a product spot on my podcast do get approached by Matrix Media (the syndicating company) as potential sponsors for the show. So Rain Station might turn up later as a sponsor. If I’m lucky. At present, though, at the time of this writing (9:46 p.m. Mountain Time on Thursday, March 15th, 2012), there is no financial arrangement between me and Mr. Beck.

When Edwin and his partners designed the RainStation water barrels, they had in mind a few modest goal: They wanted to make a product that’s easy on the eyes, the environment, the user, and the user’s basement.

They ended up with something shaped like a huge ceramic flower pot—the kind with a couple of rings around the middle—topped by a lid that can be converted into a planter. Now, people can argue until the cows come home about whether something’s pretty or not, but it seems to me fair to put a check beside “at least moderately good-looking, as rain barrels go.”

The barrels are made of 30-90% recycled material, and their tapered design means that they nest, one within another, so tightly that there’s only a four-inch gap between their bottoms—just enough room for the fittings and parts. As a result, they take up far less space in warehouses, trucks, (and your garage, should you choose to store them over the winter) than traditional barrel-shaped items. Less space on trucks means less fuel spent on transporting them. (Yes, a load weighs more, but over a long distance, it’s more efficient to ship fewer, heavier loads than more, lighter ones.)

Put a check beside “smaller environmental footprint.”

Then there’s ease of set-up, and I’m going to cheat here and include a bit about other gadgetry. A RainStation comes with a spigot (you know, so you can get water out of the thing), and with the hardware that links it to your rainspout, AND with the saw you need to cut through the downspout. You can also get gadgets to connect barrels to each other, as well as a kit to convert any barrel into a rain barrel. (A word to the not-so-wise: don’t use one that has contained oh, say, oil or fertilizer or anything you wouldn’t want to eat.)

Now, lots of rain barrels—but not all— come with spigots, and some come with the necessary hardware, but I haven’t seen another that includes a hole saw. In fact, on a lot of sites, it isn’t at all clear what does come with the barrel (if anything), or how in fact it is meant to be used. Now, I haven’t used the EarthMinded hole saw, so I can’t go too far out on a limb here, but I’m willing to put at least a tentative check beside “easy to install.” At least you’ll have all the necessary parts.

Finally, there’s that small matter about being easy on the basement, which in this case means not flooding it.

Many rain barrels just sit beneath a shortened downspout, which seems perfectly fine until you really think about it–or until there’s a heavy rain, whichever comes first. I was caught quite off-guard when Edwin said that some barrels actually flood basements when they overflow. Clearly, I hadn’t really thought about it. But apparently I’m not the only one: EarthMinded receives a lot of calls from people upset because their rain barrel (bought elsewhere) overflows when it’s full. When an EarthMinded barrel fills up, a diverter directs the excess water back into the downspout which, one hopes, directs it away from the foundation.  (This is good, by the way. Away from the foundation is good.)

Another checkmark.

So how do these barrels stack up against the competition? Well, there are other moderately attractive barrels out there*, including some with a flat side that can be set flush against a wall. And there are others that can be linked up in series, some with spigots, a few with diverters, even a couple with planter lids (though none as big as the planters on the RainStation, so far as I’ve seen.)

But I have not seen a single rain barrel designed to nest, one within the next, except the EarthMinded RainStation, and by now I’ve at least glanced at dozens. As far as I can see, this is the only one designed to save transportation costs. And as far as I can tell, this is the only company that’s even thought about trying to save on those costs.

Chalk up a big one for the RainStation.

* In my opinion there’s a limit to how pretty a huge hunk of plastic can be make to look. So it should come as no surprise that the only rain barrel I’ve seen that actually makes me swoon is a full-fledged, retrofitted wine or whisky barrel made of wood. They’re beautiful, but they cost a minor fortune, and they do not nest.

The incredible thing about interviewing Judy Owsowitz is how much she knows. This is true of just about everyone I interview, and I always learn something, but in a way it’s more startling when the topic is one that I actually think I know something about, such as starting seeds and caring for the seedlings.

Judy’s been farming for decades up in the Whitefish area of Montana, not so far from Glacier Park, though a heck of a lot lower. She used to do it with horses, but had to give them up; they’re much more expensive than tractors, she told me. She’s got a certified organic operation where she raises not just vegetables, but herbs, flowers, and edible flowers, and she also collects and and sells the seeds from many of her crops. Finally, she actually develops lines of organic, cool-season crops, including a spinach and several tomatoes.

And if that doesn’t keep her busy enough, she’s involved with the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA), with the Montana Organic Association (MOA), and she actually helped establish Montana’s organic certification program.

So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that she knows so much, and so much more than I do.

Here’s one thing I learned: that it helps to put a little dent in the soil before dropping in a small seed, since the slight compression will help hold water.

And here’s another: that lots of things, including peppers and tomatoes, can be sowed super-densely in flats (Judy calls them the “moma-trays”), then gently transplanted after sprouting their second sets of true leaves.

And another: that it’s important to fill pots almost full, to improve air circulation around seedlings, which helps prevent damping off disease.

And this: That eggplant germination rates vary with the age of the seed, and that bottom heat helps a lot.

So it went. Every time I turned around, verbally speaking, Judy was way out ahead of me, scattering information before and behind, broadcasting it to the winds. I conducted this interview, but I’m going to have to listen to it again at least once to make sure I didn’t miss one of her great tips.

Judy Owsowitz, owner and manager of Terrapin Farm, in Whitefish, MT.

There’s no website, but the facebook page, Terrapin Farm, has some wonderful photos, including the one at the head of this post. And if you’re interested in ordering seeds, you can reach Judy via her e-mail:

Judy Owsowitz <terrapin@aboutmontan.net>

And don’t forget that she’s got an internship program. Makes me wish I were a lot younger and stronger than I am.