Good dirt

[gwendally]

The proponent of a regional wood-fired electric plant says that one of the advantages of the plant is that the ash is full of nutrients that can be sold as organic fertilizer.

My mother used to shill for Shaklee vitamins, and one of their spiels is that their vitamins contain more micro-nutrients than the "chemical" vitamins and we needed to take

Comments

[eekm]

While I agree that soil maintenance is important, and there is no point in wasting nutrients, the science behind obesity being related to nutritional deficiencies just isn't there. Americans and in general most 1st-world humans are not nutritionally deficient at this point. We simply evolved to like food. A lot. It was a limiting resource in most of human evolution, so its in our genes to want food and to be thrifty with storing excess as fat.

[gwendally]

Interesting. I'd heard it more as conjecture than as conclusion, so that's good to know.

I always figured the Shaklee claims were spurious: people are just too good at living on hardly anything to need the embarrassingly rich urine that those vitamins provide.

But then I see (mostly obese) people living nearly completely on corn products and I've got to wonder if there's something to it. There's certainly plenty of evidence that people stay HEALTHIER if they eat a variety of fruits and vegetables and get phytonutrients.

[coercedbynutmeg]

Corn makes *everything* fat really quickly. Why do you think they feed it to beef cattle and chickens almost exclusively? It must be easily converted to fat/meat, etc. And yes, butchering aside, I think corn-fed animals have a lot lower life expectancy than their grass-fed counterparts. Compare the lifespan of a wild turkey to those the president pardons.

[froggoddess]

I want to start a raspberry patch, too -- what are you going to do for a trellis? Mind if I wander over sometime and take a look? :)

[gwendally]

You know that line of barberries I have on the north side of my yard?

Not so much anymore. I tore out several more today and we're installing another section of lattice. I'm planting the raspberries on the south side of the fence.

I started this project last year, but I have to let some time pass in between attacking the barberry hedge for the wounds to heal and the memories to fade.