As you remember from last week we ended with Dr. Earth®. If you haven’t been to a garden center recently, then you might not know that Dr. Earth® is an organic gardening supply company but, in actuality, is the poly-bagged personification of one Milo Lou Shammus. Now, I’m going to pick on the good Doctor but I’ll first put out the caveat that Dr. Earth® has a number of competitors, some of whom I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, but none of whom – despite selling the same Snake Oil – are as blatantly disingenuous, as ethically corrupt, or as downright whacked as Dr. Earth®.

All of them – FoxFarm, Jobes, Espoma, Kellogg, among the host – are pushing the idea that dumping a bag of their stuff on your garden will promote the lush growth and abundant harvests shown in their propaganda. But, young Milo is going to take the brunt of my tirade because he gives himself the credit for coming up with the whole idea and for trademarking a plain old English word – probiotic – by violating the rules of modern spelling and making it “ProBiotic®.” That’s just wrong.

Last week we talked about the foundation of compost, that wonderful creation which allows you to take an unsightly mix of clippings, egg shells, coffee grounds, and broccoli such as this and, without so much as waving a wand over the heap, turn it into a rich, friable mix like this.

It’s a wonder to behold.

You take stuff you were going to throw away anyway, add some dirt (usually attached to the roots of the weeds you pull), the worms arrive, and presto! Compost.

Or as it was known to our Founding Fathers: manure.

Since those revolutionary times, the meaning of the word has become specific to the back-end product of livestock, but back in the day it referred to anything you’d spread on your fields as a soil amendment or fertilizer. It could be powdered lime, seaweed, a green crop – like peas – that would be plowed under, or those fragrant, steaming piles of what we, today, call manure. In fact, in the decades at the end of the Enlightenment, our Revolutionary Leaders were so obsessed with manure that George Washington – consummate Founding Father and inventor of the one-dollar bill – searched for a gardener who could “Midas-like convert every thing[sic] he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold.”

I am proud to follow in his footsteps.

But back to Dr. Earth®.

Milo puts out a catalog. It’s titled “Dr. Earth® Gardening Guide, For the Organic Lifestyle!” It’s one of these infomercial type publications where informative articles are woven in with the descriptions of Dr. Earth’s® (is the possessive trademarked too???) ProBiotic® and Pro-Moisture Hydrate® based plant supplements. It actually reads more like the menu at the Four Seasons than a fertilizer catalog. “Valley Grown Alfalfa Meal,” indeed.

Which I’m good with. I mean, snake oil salesmen have long been a feature of America’s commercial landscape, but with Dr. Earth®, not only is he selling you snake oil, he’s switching the bottle after you pay.

On Page One he gets his cred out on the table so you’ll buy into the pitch. You find out that: “NO ONE CAN CONTEST that I, Milo Shammas, invented the concept of infusing organic fertilizers and soil with beneficial soil microbes…” and “my competitors…have learned, because of my leadership…” and “I created a company…[that] would shake up an industry and wake up a world made sick…” Just on the first page.

On Page Two he talks about his flagship product, Life®. Yes, he’s trademarked the word life, too. He talks about his “Seven Champion Strains of beneficial soil microbes” and “eight select strains of ecto and endo mycorrhizae.” I guess “Champion” rates capitalization whereas mere “select” does not. But anyway, who is judging his strains to be “Champion?” Is there a select panel of bio-judges handing out tiny ribbons? Are there microbe shows? Contests? And what are they anyway?

Well, the Man Who Saved the World can’t tell you, because the formulation is “proprietary”.

But I will.

Soil microbes are bacteria. Mycorrhizae (you’ll have figured out by dusting off your Latin skills) are root-dwelling fungus. Your yard, even if it used to be a parking lot, is teeming with both in untold billions. They key thing here is that you’ve already got them and the strains you have are perfectly adapted to your environment requiring nothing more than to be fed.

Now, say you blow fifty-bucks on a forty-pound bag of Dr. Earth® Life®. You get a bag of compost with some bugs and fungus in it. You sprinkle it on your garden and you get to not witness (unless you own a microscope) a Smackdown® of Darwinian proportions where your, now well-fed and perfectly adapted, soil microbes kick the living shit – if you’ll pardon my French – out of the lab-grown pussies in the bag. You’ve basically paid fifty-dollars to kill off the very things you paid fifty-dollars to get.

But the ones I buy will build up the soil faster right?

Maybe, if you’re starting with a garden composed entirely of lunar regolith you had flown in for the occasion; because soil microbes reproduce very quickly – about once every twenty minutes. Say, just for arguments sake, that Dr. Earth® tosses in a million microbes per dose of Life®. Further say that your pitiful excuse for dirt has one microbe. Just one. And we’ll assume a stable population – where birth equals death at available resources – of one billion (which is actually typical for a gram of topsoil). It takes Dr. Earth’s® million “Champions” just over three hours to reach a billion while it takes your lonesome Xanthamonas just seven hours longer to reach the same population. That would be overnight. All you have to do is feed them.

And what does our good Doctor want us to feed them. Well, in a borderline act of treason, he never puts any “manure” in his fertilizer. This is because poultry is now raised in “Prison Camps for Chickens” and he believes that chickens are “living creatures with as much right to a healthy, natural life as any others.” He doesn’t specify “any other” what.

Regardless, Dr. Earth® refuses to pack his bags full of chicken poo – which is “an unethical practice” – and sell them at “$5 – $10 for a 4-lb bag” when he can pack them full of something else and sell it to you, ethically, I’m assuming, for $12.77 for that same four-pound bag.

So what is Milo packing?

Dr. Earth® is against factory farming and duping the consumer by selling poisoned waste from those farms to you, the unsuspecting consumer. So instead his ingredients are: “Forest Humus” and “Fir Bark” – courtesy of the logging industry. He’s got “Bat Guano” and “Wild-caught Alaskan Fish Bone Meal,” no doubt sustainably extracted. Then there’s my personal favorite: “Northern California Hemp Protein Powder.” And of course he’s got “High Country Feather Meal” and “Kiln-dried blood meal” and “Bone Meal”, straight from the offal pits down at the local “Prison Camps.”

Like Milo says, “Frankly, it’s robbery.” And take his advice: “Read the labels on bagged organic fertilizers and make sure you’re getting what you pay for!”

So what should you, as a gardener committed to the organic, goddess-worshipping, tree-hugging, dirt-under-the-fingernails, don’t-peel-that-potato lifestyle, do? Easy. Make compost. Get yourself a worm-bin, a compost barrel, build a fenced enclosure (as on the micro-farm), or clean out a closet and just start tossing stuff into it. Here’s what you put in: everything of a vegetative origin except sticks. Worms love, simply love, coffee grounds. We avoid high protein additives like meat scraps and cat poop – but they’ll compost too. I’ve heard that you shouldn’t put in citrus – I assume because of the acidity – but we compost tons of the stuff without problem.

You can go on. Using old cardboard as mulch will kill weeds and it composts in place. You can compost paper towels, tissues, old cotton clothes, whatever. It’s all fertilizer and, it’s all free.

As I’ve admitted before, we do use some fertilizer as needed and we do sprinkle a touch of mycorrhizae around the roots when planting a tree. (We use Xtreme Gardening’s – who didn’t bother to trademark “Xtreme,” only their logo – Mykos product because we get a multi-year supply for less than three bucks.)

But mostly it’s compost. Lots and lots of compost. Lots.

For free.

I’ve always felt that we should be understanding of others, whether they be saints or snake oil salesmen, and with that in mind I want to let our old friend Dr. Earth® sign off today with some of his personal wisdom.

He says adding compost “to your soil will help provide great tilth, microorganisms, nutrients, and nutrient stores.” 

Everything your garden needs, and you don’t have to throw away another plastic bag. Or fifty bucks.

And be sure to read the bag. If it says “organic” on the front, you can be sure that there’s nothing but bullshit inside.

(Dr. Earth®, ProBiotic®, Pro-Moisture Hydrate®, and Life® are registered trademarks of the Dr. Earth Company. Smackdown® is a registered trademark of the WWE. You be the judge.)