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. Read more…

Organic Gardening