Earth day will be celebrated April 22nd. Below is an article by Senator Gaylord Nelson on its history. Celebrate this important day.

How the First Earth Day Came About
by Senator Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day

What was the purpose of Earth Day? How did it start? These are the questions I am most frequently asked.

The idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political “limelight” once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. I flew to Washington to discuss the proposal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who liked the idea. So did the President. The President began his five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963. For many reasons the tour did not succeed in putting the issue onto the national political agenda. However, it was the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

I continued to speak on environmental issues to a variety of audiences in some twenty-five states. All across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed except the political establishment. The environmental issue simply was not to be found on the nation’s political agenda. The people were concerned, but the politicians were not.

After President Kennedy’s tour, I still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me – why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air – and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office.

Five months before Earth Day, on Sunday, November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy article by Gladwin Hill reporting on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events:

“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam…a national day of observance of environmental problems…is being planned for next spring…when a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’…coordinated from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson is planned….”

It was obvious that we were headed for a spectacular success on Earth Day. It was also obvious that grassroots activities had ballooned beyond the capacity of my U.S. Senate office staff to keep up with the telephone calls, paper work, inquiries, etc. In mid-January, three months before Earth Day, John Gardner, Founder of Common Cause, provided temporary space for a Washington, D.C. headquarters. I staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes as coordinator of activities.

Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.

Here is the direct link to this story.
http://earthday.envirolink.org/history.html

The Aztec people are credited with developing mound gardens, which are also called floating gardens in many areas. This form of gardening was created at least 2000 years ago.  Mound gardens are gardens somewhat like a raised bed garden that were planted in marshy wetlands and shallow lakes. The Aztecs had much land that was too wet for growing but they needed the space for crops so developed this type of planting to reclaim the land.

The Aztec garden plots usually measured between 15 and 30 feet wide and often were up to 300 feet long. To stabilize the sides of the garden the mounds were secured using a wattle type fence system and willows were usually planted to prevent erosion. A waddle fence is a fence made of branches that are intertwined to create a sturdy fencing that breathes like a wire fence would but holds back animals and even soil.

The mounds were built on the soil as it sat which was often decaying vegetation and washed in sediment from flooding. This base would act as fertilizer to the soil that was placed on top. The plants would thrive as their roots reached into the nutrient rich soil. Numerous crops could be planted in the same place during the growing season. Maize, beans, squash, and tomatoes thrived in these growing beds for the Aztec people.

One additional advantage of these mound beds were that the top layer of the ground would be dry but the lower layers were moist and the water could be used by the crops cutting down on watering and supplying the much needed water during the hot summer months.

This gardening technique is still used today in many areas and it has been a form of reclaiming land for horticultural used in other countries and in the United States. Washington D.C., New York and San Francisco used this practice particularly in the early years when immigrants were settling these areas.

This form of gardening will always serve a purpose in many countries and is actually very practical. It cuts down on watering and irrigation problems in hot dry areas. It also supplies the nurtients needed for abundant drops with very little additional effort needed once the mound beds are built.

This is an article sent in for the Community garden contest that is from the 1800’s. It has been left in its original wording. I know most of the garden history tips came from “the Practical Gardener” Thomas Eden from Kentucky sent in these garden history pieces. There are five packets of seeds headed you way. Thank you for participating! Happy gardening, DeniseGeorgian and Victorian gardeners used all manner of manures to improve the fertility of their garden soil. Here are just a few:

Well rotted fish – dug in very, very well.

Horse dung – probably one of the most widely used manures as it was the most widely available. Horse dung from London’s streets and gardens, for example, provided the market gardens surrounding London with over 60 tons of manure per acre per year. Horse manure was at its best once it had fermented a little – most gardeners advised against using it fresh.

Cattle dung - often particularly recommended for very dry and sandy soils.

Compost – almost all working Victorian gardens had at least one large compost heap. Often scraps of vegetation or cast aside vegetables were not composted as such, but merely cut up and dug straight into the soil. Green crops, pond weeds, hedge parings and fresh cut lawn clippings needed no composting at all according to advice – they could be added direct to the flower or vegetable plot.

 Seaweed – particularly recommended for vegetable gardens.

Bird dung – this was highly popular, and several families made their fortune by importing massive quantities of guano from South America. Otherwise gardeners made do with pigeon dung (often available in quantities, and recommended for strawberries in particular).

Sheep and deer dung - not often used in urban gardens as it was hard to procure, it was used widely in rural areas. It needed to be dug in quickly while still fresh so as to retain all its moisture and nutrients.

Soot – another widely available commodity in pre-electrical Britain. Most people depended on coal fires for cooking, and the soot could be sprinkled over the surface of the garden. Soot was not only considered a very powerful fertilizer, gardeners also believed it acted as a deterrent to wire-worms and maggots.

Crushed bone and horn - shavings of bone or horn were believed to provide an excellent manure but were difficult to procure in useful quantities.

Blood – always popular as a gardening fertilizer. Gardeners could collect blood in vast quantities at slaughter houses and butchers, and also at confectionary manufacturers where cattle blood was used to separate out the impurities in brown sugar. Of course, slaughter houses were not the only places blood could be obtained. Useful contacts could be made in the wards and theatres of hospitals, and buckets of blood for the flower bed obtained via the back door. This practice went on so late as the early 1980s, when one of the editors of this site recalls watching a theatre sister handing buckets of blood out the back door to the hospital housekeeper, who kept the hibiscus in the front garden of the hospital in spectacular bloom with patients’ blood dug in during the dark hours.

Salt – a debate raged over whether or not salt was good or bad for the garden. Patently, as there was a debate over it, some gardeners did use salt as a fertilizer, but increasingly by the early nineteenth century opinion was turning against the use of salt in soil.

Urine – whether animal or human, it needed to be used quickly before it ‘putrefied’. Gardeners believed it should be diluted with water. Today, of course, we use it neat on our compost heaps.

Wood ash and charcoal dust – often obtained in considerable quantities from lime or brick kilns.

Sawdust, tanner’s bark and wood shavings.

Lime – used as quick lime, or mild lime Lime was used more in sandy soils than clay based soils.

Coal was also often used.

A recipe for a cheap and useful fertilizer was as follows:Raise a platform of earth, on any spare piece of land, eight feet wide, one foot high, and any length according to the amount required. On the first stratum of earth lay a thin stratums of lime, fresh from the kiln. Dissolve this into the earth with brine from the rose of a watering can and immediately add another layer of earth. Lime and brine as before, carrying it to any convenient height. In a week, it should be carefully turned over, broken and mixed, so that the entire mass may be thoroughly incorporated. This compost has been used in Ireland, and it has doubled the crops of potatoes and cabbages and is said to be far superior to stable dung.

Charles McIntosh, the Practical Gardener, 1828.