Favorite Quote Of The Week

“I am not a revolutionary; I utter only a plain truth.My wife and I produce most of our food, and some for our children’s families, using knowledge we gained from our parents.Not a one of our forebears ever cracked an agronomic textbook or knew the Latin name of a single plant.My father and mother and both grandfathers and grandmothers and my father-in – law and mother-in-law all held agricultural extension advisers in disdain. Tradition, supplemented by our own experience and that of other gardeners and farmers, has been the key to our food-growing success.Thousands of books by gardeners and farmers pass this knowledge on to anyone who wants it. To this day, after forty years of avidly reading and searching the realms of “modern” agriculture for information, I have found little knowledge beyond oral tradition that helps us produce food any better. And a whole lot that encourages us to produce it worser.The keys to agricultural success, apart from common sense, were articulated by Virgil, and he got them from the Greeks, who in turn got them from the Orient, where forty centuries ago China supported a population far denser than ours today, with gardens.And for the most part, China and all the East still supports itself primary by the kind of small farms that in the U.S. the Census Bureau is trying to define out of existence.”

~ Gene Logsdon –

From the THE CONTRARY FARMER’S INVITATION TO GARDENING – Chelsea Green Publishing, 1997