New Ideas v Common Sense

There's a lot of articles and books being written these days, about eco-systems, permaculture, forest gardening and so on, and many of them tend towards the over-intense, dippy-hippy indoctrination type of thing. 

Like most of us, I don't like being preached at: I don't like being told that I “must” do this, or that I "must" do that: I like to think that I'm a grown-up, and I can make my own decisions, thank you very much. 

But there's often a very good idea at the bottom of the ranting, and it's well worth keeping an open mind: open, in the sense of being open to new ideas, and at least prepared to consider any “new” information, or “new” research results. 

After all, remember the case of Rachel v The Snapper? *laughs*

On the other hand, there is no point rushing to jump on the latest bandwagon, before there has been time to assess it on a longer time-scale: just about every aspect of gardening is based on duration, on a "length of time", and anything that offers a quick fix is bound to be a failure.

One example of this is the 3-month compost heap. Yes, there are people on the internet claiming that if you use their product, their method, their chemicals, you can have perfect compost in under three months. Not in my experience, you can't!

Or the recent fad for mulching mowers: ten years ago, this was terribly trendy, because it hit all the right buttons - no more piles of slimy rotting grass, and it's much faster to get the mowing done, because you don't have to keep stopping to empty it. Oh, and we're returning the nitrogen-rich clippings to the sward, so we won't need to use chemical fertilisers any more. 

At that time I was still in the PGG (Professional Gardeners' Guild), and many of my then-colleagues rushed out to buy mulching mowers for their hundreds of acres of grass.  But, ten years on, most of them are now starting to go back to their old pick-up mowers: as predicted, they are finding that returning the clippings just causes a build-up of what is called "thatch", a layer of small bits of dead grass which prevent light and moisture from reaching the soil, and therefore the roots of the grass. This results in the grass becoming sparser, not becoming increasingly lush.

So what seemed like a great idea has turned out, over a period of ten years or so, not to be a good idea after all. 

I suppose the "trick" is to be able to spot the new ideas which are winners, and to avoid the losers - easier said than done!

My personal philosophy is to do due diligence on any "new" ideas: do some research, do some reading, get some facts: then apply common sense to it. And if it's a new wonder tool, I would try to borrow one, before I bought it. Like the Snapper.....

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