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| Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona illustrates God's landscaping methods. |
Strangely, gardeners and farmers have followed the Liebig mistake in thinking their big programs work better than microscopic action in the soil.
- If I buy 40 pounds of nitrogen and spread it on my lawn, the grass will be so happy. I will bag up all the clippings and haul them away for that neat pool table look.
- If I scratch fertilizer into the garden, the flowers will love me.
- If I rototill the garden before and after the season, the soil will be be fertile and smooth.
All three programs are wrong for the soil and harmful for the plants. Yet people blunder away, spending too much money and working too hard for bad results.
Almost all the nutritional benefits come from fungi and bacteria, and the interactions based upon fungi and bacteria. The bacteria are so small that 500,000 fit on the same space occupied by a period at the end of a sentence. Fungi are bigger and can be quite lengthy. Fungi can grow faster in a few hours than bacteria move in a lifetime.
As a Creation gardener, I want to help the fungi and bacteria distribute nutrition as they work with earthworms and other creatures. The three actions above damage the microscopic actions in the soil without providing more than marginal help. For example, Scotts Lawn fertilizer will not stay in the lawn but pass through into the water table, adding to pollution.
In contrast, nitrogen from mulched grass will be locked up by the soil creatures and passed back and forth in the root zone, to feed and energize those living forms that need nitrogen. They pass it to plant roots in exchange for their carbohydrates. The root tips receive nutrition from and donate food the bacteria, protozoa, and fungi need.
The earthworms are gentle bulldozers than move soil constantly, improving and multiplying the good effects of the bacteria they graze upon. I do not want to tear up this intricate web, but support it from above by protecting it from disruption.
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| Crepe Myrtle can produce glorious, long-lasting blooms, and bloom again the same summer. |
Before, when I put mulch under the crepe myrtle bush, I thought about holding in rainwater and protecting the surface from drying out and wind erosion.
Now I realize that by mulching the bush with its plant material, I am feeding the bacteria and especially the fungi that need dark moist environs to do their work. Fungi distribute the chemicals where they are needed.
Church Programs - Scotts Lawn for Congregations
Church programs are like the three damaging steps I described above. The grand projects, often forced at a national level, ignore the divine effect of the Word and substitute man's cleverness. The more they fail, the more they insist on doing everything the wrong way. They search among all the false teachers to find an expensive magical formula instead of trusting in God's Word.
Creation and the efficacy of the Word are two sides of the same coin, to borrow a phrase. Denying one means rejecting the other.
