NON COMPOST MENTIS
Gardening Has Its Mysteries
so Sellar and Yeatman say, "should possess a keen sense of humus." For humus read compost, and you get the order of the day at the Wellington Botanical Gerdens "Dig for Victory" function on a recent Saturday. It was speeches, speeches all the way, and compost mixed in our path like mad. ce a. really grim gardeners," Tinakori Road was lined with cars up and down each side of the street, end officials were standing everywhere. Through the gates the gardens were beautiful. Down through the trees floated bag-pipe music, and an old man said "Follow the pipes if you’d reach the plots." Bagpipes aren't easy to follow, but we struggled up paths and along paths and at last came to a stretch of lawn crowded with people and children, gardeners, amateur and _ professional, and the Caledonian Pipe Band. There must have been between two and three thousand people there on the lawn.
FIRST the speeches. * % 2s HIS is not a stunt campaign," one official deciared. ‘War always brings a shortage of food. We must grow more to enable more to be dehydrated for overseas. And after the war the need wiil still exist for a long time." The _ people pressed closer to one another for warmth, for the day was cold and bleak, They were not an expressive
crowd; they seemed uncertain how to take the proceedings, for this was a new venture to them, but they listened with curiosity, though some snorted and said "Nobody can teach us anything." Then another speaker urged the people to grow more themselves by the self-help principle, and for those without gardens there were plots in the townbelt. Five hundred had already been taken. * % * | AFTER that, we turned our attention to the compost demonstration. As we jostled one another, and peered over shoulders, we caught glimpses now and then of what they were doing, and now and then, above the wind, we heard the voice of the demonstrator. What we saw was a very convenient compost box made of concrete slabs bolted together, and so constructed that any slab could easily be removed and the compost forked over. We saw also neat piles of stable straw, rotted leaves, and grass clippings, fine light soil, wood ash, and a bag of lime. A tall young gardener was forking in the grass and leaves, then the straw. "Where can we get straw?" a sadlooking woman asked. "And where can we get concrete slabs?" the man next to her murmured. But*the demonstrator must almost have heard them, for he was saying that anything could go into the compost boxtea leaves, dust from a vacuum cleaner, kapok-and any kind of. a box would do as long as there was drainage. The crowd pressed closer while the gardener shovelled in soil, then wood ash and lime, more rotted grass and so on. Then the crowd scattered hastily, for the wind caught up the lime and roughly peppered our faces, and one man kicked the bucket of wood ash... . Ea * * ‘THE Pipe Band struck up again. The gardener gathered up his tools, and the compost box was left to mature at leisure. In the seed plots, they were sowing peas three inches below the ground in double rows an inch apart, while the drums rolled in the background. They drilled for carrots and beets with a corner of the rake and planted the seeds to the slow march "My Home." They planted beans two inches deep, and told us not to forget the hoe... . * * * BUT we remembered a discussion in the BBC Listener between Percy Izzard and Dr. B. A. Keen, of Rotham-
stead. The title was "What's the Use of Hoeing?" Percy Izzard said: "Gardeners are told to keep the hoe moving round the plants in order to keep a loose mulch over the soil. And the teachers and textbooks claim to give the scientific reasons why hoeing is beneficial. They say that the soil is porous, that it is like a bundle of narrow capillary tubes up which the water will rise to the surface. Hoeing breaks the tops of these tubes; with the result that the water can’t rise to the surface and be lost by evaporation." But Dr. Keen called this "a good example of a perfectly sound scientific fact wrongly applied." "Water," he explained, "does rise up a narrow tube, as anyone can prove for himself by dipping the bottom end of a fine glass tube into a saucer of water. But the soil pore spaces are not really like capillary tubes; their walls are broken by innumerable openings. The soil pore space ‘is like innumerable little holes or caverns joined up to one another by multitudes of even smaller short tunnels. In a pore space of that kind, the water moves much more slowly and over much shorter distances than the capillary tube theory would predict. And that means in practice that water cannot rise to the soil surface from below except from a short distance; 12 inches or so, in sandy soil, and two or three feet in clayey soil. There is no point in hoeing to break the tops of those capillary tubes because the water is not going to reach the top anyhow. So from what I have already said, you will see that frequent hoeings may not be really necessary. And that is what we have found.In fact, too many hoeings after the crop has passed its young stage may even reduce’ the yield. But while the crop is still young, it’s a different story. Then, for reasons which we do not yet fully understand, it is worth while hoeing fairly frequently. This is particularly so if the soil is not very fertile or if you have not been able to give it enough manure. In those conditions, early hoeings do seem to improve the yield. Izzard! Wouldn't that be due to the killing of weeds? Keen: That’s part of the reason. Even a quite moderate amount of small weeds while the crop is young seem to give it a permanent set-back. But when the crop is well established, the later weeds-even a heavy growth of themdon’t seem to affect the yield.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 226, 22 October 1943, Page 10
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1,041NON COMPOST MENTIS New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 226, 22 October 1943, Page 10
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