MINERAL FERTILIZATION, NUTRITION AND HEALTH


A corner of your cemented garage floor makes an ideal “mixing” spot. This book was written at a Government “experimental” station to save you money and yet produce the highest quality products which will satisfy the palate and properly nourish you when the crops are grown.


DEAR MR. BARKER, The most practical I can give Major Mackenzie and your readers who want to know how to grow “vegetables of the highest food values” is to refer him and them to a book styled “The Chemistry of the Garden” by a Mr. Cousins, Director of the Birkenstead Experimental Station (Kent) published by either Macmillan or Hutchinson, London, price about Is. 3d.

This small work has been a constant reference of mine for about thirty years. It is simplicity itself and has never failed me. One must understand that various crops require differing “diets”; for instance, some demand double the superphosphates that the average plants can consume to mature their products to the best advantage as food, viz, tomatoes and grape vines.

The modifications of plant requirements are all explained in simplest manner in this book I have quoted and the quantities are reduced to “so many ounces per square yard” occupied by the various vegetables (and flowers). A little experience and perhaps once or twice weighing a “handful” of the chemical manures, will make it easy to apply the right quantity of the correct “combination” to any plot, or “running yard” of the row to be fertilized.

This book will save money by showing “how to combine” the right amounts of the necessary chemical manures for nearly everything grown by chemicals needed. Several people can combine in this purchase to be divided amongst them. This comes much cheaper. For instance, certain valuable “special vine mixtures”, well advertised, to cost about L5 a ton, and other mixtures in like proportion.

A corner of your cemented garage floor makes an ideal “mixing” spot. This book was written at a Government “experimental” station to save you money and yet produce the highest quality products which will satisfy the palate and properly nourish you when the crops are grown. It is a good point which Mr. Mackenzie has raised for your benefit.

In consuming “prime” vegetables you are thus obtaining the mineral salts which your body must have in order to be healthy.

In eating enough of this “roughage” people will cure their “constipation”, but they must masticate all food well. If any cannot digest onions, or any other particular vegetable, consult a Homoeopathic doctor and failing to find such, consult your own Materia Medica, when you will most probably find that a few doses of Thuja will cure this “onion” idiosyncrasy, etc.

But when you have grown your “prime” vegetables you can lose all their values down the kitchen sink at the hands of a careless cook, when it is better to “fire” her, is she wont cook your vegetables properly. Take a lesson from the French cooks. Steam your vegetables, or use so little water in the cooking, so that when they are cooked there is practically no water to throw away. A common stew, with very little meat to flabour it, if you must have that article, and plenty of vegetables is far more nutritious, in that you consume all plant values.

Eat “raw” vegetables as salads which are much more valuable than when cooked. I have seen many elderly people who could digest “raw” cabbage, finely sliced, who could not eat the cooked (and boiled out) article, which bloated them, but this requires well chewing and saliva mixing as with all food. If you use “salad oil” make sure than this is real “olive oil. If it is “cotton- seed oil” or colza (“huile blanche” of the French) these two “oils” are very indigestible, whilst real “olive” oil is the most easily digestible vegetable oil grown. Dont believe the advertisements which tell you that “cotton-seed oil” is easy to digest. I have seen it scour and almost kill cattle fed with cotton-seed cake.

In cooking your vegetables, for Gods sake never use aluminium ware for reasons shown you in past issues of “HEAL THYSELF”. Such aluminium cooking vessels throw off salts of the metal which will ruin any stomach and the first section of the intestines (duodenum), which can cause very serious diseased conditions, even gastric and duodenal ulcers.

To grow vegetables well you must feed your soil with farmyard manure, or its equivalent, to provide enough humus. Dont be afraid of this manure finding its way into the kitchen. Nature elaborates this manure and the plants absorb the entirely changed elements in a manner arranged by Nature. Dont try to feed your plants with LIME by applying ground mineral limestone to the soil.

This will sweeten a sour soil and encourage bacterial life to work better in the soil, but it wont supply lime to growing plants. Just as in medical treatments you must feed plants a finely divided or powdered bone meal (or soluble superphosphates) which the plants can utilize. In medicine, we can sweeten a sour stomach with lime water, but Homoeopaths know and wont rest with this “chemical change”.

We have many ways of correcting and curing the constitution which produces “sour stomachs”. So to obtain “prime” vegetables (or flowers) you must feed your ground with first class bone meal or high class superphosphates.

When Homoeopaths want to “feed” (supply) lime to a patient they obtain this by employing an “animal” lime, which we get from the inner layers of the Oyster shells (or shells). These limes are readily absorbed by the body. High potencies of this Oyster shell (Calcarea Carbonica) stimulates Nature to make use of any “lime salts” to be found in the “days rations”, which should contain this material, or the “food” is imperfect and valuables.

Often the body is lacking in vital forces to make use of the lime offered it in food and this can be corrected by Calcarea carb. This subject is too extensive to be explained here. By that “Chemistry of the Garden”. It is the best investment a gardener can make. Anyone can “feed-up” a garden patch to produce the most nourishing foodstuffs, just as the French do, but it requires some guidance and patience.

Mussolini has in a few years raised the Italian National yield of wheat from an average of fourteen bushels per acre to twenty- four bushels per acre, which latter will pay.

To refer back to Major Mackenzies cultivating the “virgin soil” of the reclaimed marshes near Rome, have produced this year some 131 bushes of AI wheat per acre. You can feed your garden plot so that you can grow everything of this first quality, by balancing the plant food you add to the soil. But, there must be a “balanced ration”. Too much Nitrates, without enough Potash and Superphosphates will produce too much leaf growth with not much food value and no keeping quality.

Nature works with infinitesimal amounts, as do the homoeopaths, when we give our minutes doses of medical “stimulants”. Agricultural chemistry had shown that with the addition of but a few pounds weight of Magnesium salts per acre, the weight and the quality of a potato crop can be doubled.

Whilst speaking of Magnesium salts they may have a bearing on Cancer. A French journal some few years ago stated that in large areas in their country where these Magnesium salts were found in abundance in the soil, there is an absence or rarity of Cancer. This I will follow up when I get to my library, being at this writing far removed from it. It is better to consider such evidence than to ignore it.

Having been a grower of things all my life, I am, simply adding the testimony of “The Chemistry of the Garden” to Major Mackenzies letter, hoping that I may encourage some to study the question of producing the finest qualities in their “home-grown” vegetables and I suggest that there is no reason for not cutting off a few hours from golf, or if some son can;t get a job in the city, why should he not turn gardener, for home supplies? Women I have always found to be AI gardeners.

There is as much health in garden patch as in many a Sanatorium, with less expense and infinitely more fun.

Yours sincerely,

E. Petrie Hoyle (M.D).

Ethelbert Petrie Hoyle
BIO: Dr. Ethelbert Petrie Hoyle 1861 – 1955 was a British orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy. He served as editor of the International Homeopathic Medical Directory and Travelling Secretary to the International Homeopathic Society.