Florida Urban Homestead

Sometimes I see something that reminds me of a line in a movie that most of us have probably seen, “Jurassic Park”. It’s the seen where the good Doctor Ian Malcolm says “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”  This line came back to me today as I read about Grafting, no not trees, but tomato plants.  It seems as though someone got the idea of grafting tomato plants to anything the could think of in the Solanaceae family that includes Eggplant, Tomatoes, Peppers, potatoes, and even tobacco!  Yes you can now have tomatoes grow above ground with potatoes underground.  But is it a good idea?  I’m not sure.  Should we get people used to getting cherry tomatoes off potato plants?  Potatoes produce cherry tomato-like fruit that even ripens red but it is poison!  Ok, ok, I know that is a reach for the horrors of grafting but you should Google this stuff.  Pour little tomato plants, so young and fresh next to their little eggplant buddies, and then  WHACK, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!  Oh the horror, I shiver.  I know I don’t think twice about grafted fruit trees, but this is just, uh, odd.  Oh who knows, perhaps it is the wave of the future and we will all look back some day and laugh.  ”Oh can you believe we used to grow tomatoes on tomato plants?  I mean really, you couldn’t even smoke the leaves!”  It could be that way some day, but a part of me hopes not.

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First off I would like to say that I love compost, and compost tea has been a blessing to me and my garden.   I have always know that plants couldn’t get everything the need to be healthy from just the three elements in most fertilizers, (NPK) Nitrogen Phosphorous, and Potash (Potassium), but could there be more?  Could there be something to add to my composting routine?   I have been hearing stories for the past few months about something new, or old depending on how you look at it.

It’s called “Rock Dust” and as the name implies it is rock that has been ground into a powder.   You add rock dust to your garden by sprinkling and, for some people at least, covering the soil with the dust and working into the soil.  Rock dust’s purpose is to add back into the soil the minerals that have been lost over the past several hundred years of gardening and only adding back NPK.  The stories of huge vegetables and wild growth abound from the users of this stuff.   It makes sense, the glaciers once moved across the  plaint, grinding rock into the soil as it went, but it never made it this far south.  And we have all seen the gigantic cabbages and pumpkins grown in Alaska where there is a lot of minerals in the ground.  Well, I aim to find out!  I am going to be checking tomorrow to see if I can find it locally, and if not, I will get some online.  Is it real?  Well, if someone told me a year ago I would be making tea from compost and pouring it on my garden, I would have wondered what the heck they were talking about.  So I intend to give it a try.   And hey, if you guys out there have tried it, let me know how it did.  Rock on dudes!

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