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On a Fad Diet of Rock Dust, How the Garden Does Grow

June 24, 2004 By HENRY HOMEYER

FOR years I had been hearing about the virtues of gardening with rock powders. Two summers ago I gave in, acquiring some finely ground granite from a company that engraves tombstones. I scratched the stuff in around my peppers.

Although it was August, the plants were small and appeared to be sulking. By mid-September I needed stakes to keep them from tipping over from the weight of the fruit - a first in my 20 years of growing peppers in chilly New Hampshire.

Joanna Campe, just down the road from me in Northampton, Mass., has been folding rock powders into her garden soil since the mid-80's, when she came across the work of an engineer turned farmer and writer, John D. Hamaker, who argued that rock dust could mimic the action of soil-enhancing glaciers.

"If we imitate how the earth forms soils, we need to give our gardens more than just the three elements found in chemical fertilizers," Ms. Campe said, suggesting they need close to 90 minerals.

Like Mr. Hamaker, Ms. Campe believes that over the millenniums the soil has been depleted, leaving the food chain deficient in important trace minerals. For centuries people in the remote Hunza Valley of Pakistan farmed soil irrigated by "glacial milk," routinely living to be 100. Other factors were of course at play, but rock powder enthusiasts theorize that the health and longevity of the Hunza people were related to the plant-borne minerals in their diet.

I was intrigued. So after my pepper explosion, I added granite powders to half of my potato plot, following Mr. Hamaker's recommendation of about 14 pounds of rock dust per 100 square feet of garden bed.

At the beginning of the growing season, the potatoes with rock powders grew like sprinters leaving the starting block. They were six to eight inches tall when the others had reached two to three inches.

The action of the powders was a bit mysterious. Rocks contain no nitrogen, the fuel for fast green growth and one of the three components of chemical fertilizers. Although they may contain some phosphorus or potassium, my soil tested more than adequate for both, so they were not correcting a deficiency.

Dr. John M. Duxbury, a professor of soil science at Cornell University, pointed out that common soil treatments like limestone and phosphorus started out as rocks - as did soil in general. But he was not convinced that rock powders raised the quality of soil already treated with fertilizer. "In the tropics we use rock phosphate because it is cheaper," he said.

Research in the tropics by Dr. Ward Chesworth, an emeritus professor of land resource science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, found that rock powders did indeed improve the productivity of soil deficient in minerals because glaciers never got that far. When asked about my potatoes, Dr. Chesworth said they may have benefited from acids around the roots, which possibly broke down the minerals and made them easier to absorb.

But even in New Hampshire, he suggested, soil could lack trace minerals, because farmers have been "making tea with the same bag for 10,000 years."

Though there are few field trials to prove the rock powder case, anecdotal evidence abounds. After using rock powders at her nursery in Claremont, N.H., for 10 years, Susan Lawrence said, her hostas became more disease-resistant and winter-hardy, and better bloomers, too.

That leaves gardeners like me experimentally dusting their plots with ground granite, basalt or other rocks. Luckily, these powders, also called rock fines and rock flour, are inexpensive - often free - from quarries and rock-crushing plants. (Sources are listed on Ms. Campe's Web site, www.remineralize.org.)

Last fall, with winter breathing down my neck, I harvested my potatoes without stopping to compare the weight of those grown with and without rock powder. This year, I treated the whole garden. And who knows? Maybe that extra dash of minerals will help me, like the Hunza farmers, live to be 100.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/garden/24ROCK.html?ex=1089077874&ei=1&en=acd5f45c33b2b275

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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Cuttings: Cooking Up Compost, Even in the Big City

February 29, 2004 By HENRY HOMEYER

ABOUT a year ago I started an earthworm farm in my pantry. This was not an attempt to get rich selling bait to anglers. Snow was still deep in my New Hampshire garden, and I needed a project to keep me busy.

I knew that earthworm castings - their manure - are rich in beneficial bacteria, fungi, nitrogen and minerals in a form readily usable by plants. Worm castings dissolved in water are great for houseplants. A sprinkle of castings around the base of a plant will perk it up. For city dwellers, raising earthworms offers the chance to generate plant food while perhaps defying a landlord's ban on pets. And worms eat kitchen scraps. It sounded worth a try.

To get started, I visited the Dartmouth College Organic Farm in Hanover, N.H., where the farm manager, Scott Stokoe, taught me the basics. We used a heavy plastic bin (20 inches by 15 inches by 12 inches deep) with four three-quarter-inch holes drilled in the bottom. Mr. Stokoe had me fill it with newspaper torn into inch-wide strips. Then, using a watering can, I moistened the strips, tumbling them with my hands until they were damp but not so wet that I could squeeze out water.

A few handfuls of Mr. Stokoe's worms, a species known as red wigglers (Eisenia fetida), went in next. The suggested meal plan - spent coffee grounds, chopped lettuce and other vegetables (hold the meat) - would nourish the worms. In time they would produce white cocoons the size of rice grains, and before long, enough of an army to turn garbage into compost.

Earthworms like to wander, especially when exposed to light. To keep a lid on their world, I placed a black plastic trash bag loosely on top. There was no need to worry about climate control as long as the pantry stayed between 65 and 80 degrees.

Soon my wigglers, fed a mix of about a cup of scraps every few days, began increasing. Summer came, and I moved the bin to the barn. Because the population was growing, I increased portions to about two quarts of scraps a week.

In the fall I was scheduled to travel and cold weather was coming, so I brought the bin back inside. I made sure the newspaper mix, lightly refreshed, was moist, and gave my charges some extra food, including orange rinds. I figured they would be fine on their own for a month.

They were fine - and so were the fruit flies, which materialized out of nowhere, as they always do, colonizing the pantry in my absence and surrounding me once I got back like the cloud that accompanied Fly Face in the old Dick Tracy comics.

I took my wiggly pets - and their unwanted companions - out to the deck and dumped them onto a plastic sheet. After plucking out the worms and setting them aside, I changed the newspapers, put the worms back and covered the bin with an old sheet held in place with a bungee cord.

AMAZINGLY, a few fruit flies survived this purge, forcing me to take more drastic action. Dragging the bin outside, I shoveled the snow off the compost pile and buried my worms deep inside.

Red wigglers, though commonly sold for composting purposes, are not soil dwellers like night crawlers and do not survive well when temperatures drop below 50. The temperature at the center of the compost heap was close to freezing, but I couldn't think what else to do. I'm fairly sure they died.

Only later did I call Mary Appelhof, known by many as the Worm Woman. A biologist and teacher by training, she has been a cheerleader for vermiculture since the early 1970's, translating dry scientific findings into popular books like "Worms Eat My Garbage" (Flower Press, 1997) and selling vermiculture goods through Flowerfield Enterprises in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Ms. Appelhof suggests that to minimize the problem with fruit flies, raise your red wigglers outside in the summer and in a warm basement in the winter. Because my basement is quite cold in winter, she suggested an alternative against the invaders: a fresh cow patty, buried in the bin, would introduce beetles into the mix, and beetles eat fruit fly larvae.

There was poetic justice to her scheme, but somehow smelly worms in the pantry did not appeal. So I think I'll stick to a no-fruit rule.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/garden/29cutt.html?ex=1079098390&ei=1&en=77b2a8ef469c12b7