Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Part of my job is hangin' out in gardening forums, lurking, helping, and trying to start a dialogue. Here's a response to my post on veganic gardening:

Just becase it's not sourced from animals does not mean it is less harmful in it's origins or in itself. Seaweed contains metals you may not want in your garden, such as mercury and arsenic. Wink

Bugs, poop, and dead animals have been a part of soil biology forever. It's natural. Veganic might be attractive to vegans etc. but that's a political choice. Veganic is not inherently better than what nature itself has been doing. It's a political choice.

I do not expect nor am I surprised that someone would shoot that down, but ugh. WHY do people get SO DEFENSIVE about new approaches to an age-old tradition?

not only unpatriotic, but unamerican. open up and take your daily dose of mercury, you hippie wookie. it'll help you think straight.

I don't know that transferring massive amounts of animal poop and body parts from industrial livestock farms is part of nature either.

People poop, or animal poop? Wink.



(Couldn't resist.)

In the Mother Earth News article from Aug/Sep there was a "Homestead on an acre" article and the guy basically said if you don't have livestock for manure your soil will be crepe. It was annoying, especially because the acre homestead wasn't really self sufficient because they had to bring in hay for the cow anyway.

I love this book "Gardening when it counts" (by Steve Solomon) book because of 2 good reasons; 1) he says if you want to be self sufficient, really self sufficient, you need to be a "vegetabletarian" because any livestock support WILL be expensive; 2) you don't necessarily need manure and gives you suggestions for things otherwise (cover cropping/good composting methods, etc). He does use a little manure but helps you out otherwise. He does also have a formula for an organic fertilizer (he mentions things like blood meal but its only one of the choices) but helps you figure out how to mostly get on without it or keep it cheap to make. I kinda want to make a "book recommendations" page. Of course I've not gotten to use any of these yet, but I think its the smartest gardening book I've read. I want to check out his compost book.

In fact, in this book, he mentioned that using too much manure can lead to some serious problems.

I might be missing something, but I don't see that as particularly defensive. The fact that you wrote SO DEFENSIVE in CAPITAL LETTERS suggests that you, too, were getting a little defensive.

I actually agree with the poster to some extent. Not everything vegan is good for soil, and not everything good for soil is vegan.

I don't think there's anything particularly new to it, other than the fact that it has a name. "Veganic" growing is, in my opinion, a rebranding (for want of a better word) of "not putting animal matter in your compost". Prior to industrially produced fertilisers etc, most people would not put animal products into their soil because they would be used, partly because this attracts rats and foxes. In Victorian England, for example, bones would be used to make stock, then given to the dog, then sold to the rag-and-bone man.

Manure is a waste-product (literally and figuratively) associated with riding schools (round here, certainly). I, again, don't see anything wrong with that.