by Thomas Lawson

In the ’70s I worked with an engineer who was intensively into organic gardening. He had recently purchased an old home in Van Nuys that needed a lot of tender loving care. When he first moved in, he couldn’t get his shovel into the ground even by jumping up and down on it.

He started by building a rabbit hutch and bought a couple of rabbits (need I say one male and one female). He then built a worm pit directly below the hutch. The hutch had an mesh screen bottom and the “droppings” fell directly into the worm pit. He removed some of the native soil and mixed it in to the pit. Periodically he would remove 50% of the rich mixture from the worm pit and incorporate it into the area where he had removed the soil. He continued to repeat this process until he had completely replaced the top few inches of the soil in his back yard.

As this operation progressed, he built raised planters and completely filled them with this mixture. He then began to plant vegetables, etc. in these planters. After five years, his back yard was filled with planters that produced copious amounts of beautiful vegetables. He never used chemical fertilizers because of the natural fertilizer in the rabbit droppings. In addition, he composted the organic residue from his garden and used the this mulch to enrich his soil. What an amazing guy and what a beautiful garden. He was decades ahead of his time. When I visited his home after he had been there for about five years, you could push the shovel into the planter soil with no effort at all.

I should also mention that he had a one year stock of dry food in his cellar and collected and stored rain water for watering his garden and for personal consumption. He may have even had a bomb shelter in his basement (it was a very tense time if you remember).

I should have spent some more time with him to learn his system.

Soil Prep Machine

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