The Complete Book of Garden Magic
second edition 1956 with all those "modern" ideas added
Roy Edwin Biles (Author)
He covers EVERY garden topic, and is very practical and feels neighborly. You just have to ignore the advice from the '40s about dusting with arsenic and nicotine!
It's interesting how most of our our other "modern " organic ideas were all taken for granted a half-century ago, went out of fashion for a few decades, and now are hotly advocated by "new-age thinkers" and resisted by "traditionalists".
I like the perspective it gives - ideas that haven't changed in 60-70 years are probably good ideas.
Ideas that have gone out of fashion:
(1) might still be good ideas, or
(2) might suggest what the important underlying PRINCIPLES are, that led to two very different ways of doing the same thing.
After all, agriculture is around 10,000 years old, and plants have changed only a little. That's a deep and rich database to tap!
I wish we could bring a few dozen medieval peasants to the modern day, just so they could look at our practices, shake their heads pityingly, and tell us "don't do THAT!" ... and probably be right more often than not, or at least remind us what our tradeoffs have really cost, or how little long-term benefit some things really give. Probably everything we would boast of, they would agree were helpful, but we do TOO MUCH of them. (Tilling, fertilizing, pesticiding, mono-cropping, intensive cropping)
Probably their biggest reaction would be amazement that we can be as lazy as we are, and still expect to have food on the table. Then shock and dismay at how greedy agri-businesses are. And surprise at how gluttonous many people are ...
Hmmmm! Sloth, greed and gluttony, how many mortal sins would NOT amaze medieval peasants at how far we have progressed beyond them? I think 5 minutes of television would convince them we're all sex maniacs. What's left ... wrath, envy and pride? I guess people of all eras had those in abundance.
People from 600 or 700 years ago wouldn't spend much time and effort scolding our agricultural sins!
