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SONIC BLOOM - MIRACLE PLANTS FROM SOUND WAVES! Continued from page 26 pulling out advantageous ones that may have been hidden for hundreds of years. This is connected to the ever-bearing trait brought out in McClurg's oranges." Suggesting that the potentials in plants to respond to human wishes should be closely examined, he lamented that botanists, plant breeders, and genetic engineers have failed to understand the problem. "Scientists are rushing headlong into tampering with plants, monstrously slicing and splicing genes with as much surgical fervour as the ghouls who cut and maim animals in labo- ratories. This has led some of them to proudly announce that in order to produce a leaner grade of pork, they have developed a cross-eyed hog that staggers pathetically on legs that can hardly hold it up." He looked up and away with the firm yet benevolent gaze of a committed soul. "We should ten- der plants and animals, not distort God- given gifts still unrevealed in his creatures, but coax these gifts and lear to live coop- eratively with all God's creatures.” But perhaps the most encouraging prospect for fulfilling Carlson's dream of growing large quantities of food on very small plots of ground in a very simple man- ner is the marriage of his system with one developed by Ron Johnston of Mississippi, an amateur farmer in his thirties who dou- bles as a night nurse in a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. In a mixture of nothing but sawdust and sand in long rectangular boxes ten inches high, Johnston has been growing a stagger- ing amount of delicious healthy produce. With discarded lumber from the sawmill, plus two pickup trucks full of free sawdust and one of sand, each box requires no more than a few hours of labour to build; and by Johnston's conservative figures a box eight feet wide by sixteen feet long can produce as many as 800 cantaloupes or 5,000 pounds of tomatoes—many times more than could ever be grown on the same size plot of ground. "It all came together for me,” says Johnston, "three years ago. Before that, I couldn't grow a thing down here on the dead soil of Mississippi. Then I got hold of a tape of Dan Carlson and I ran into a farmer using microbes. I also read about the French intensive method and that gave me the idea for the boxes. The system eliminates ploughing, cultivating and weeding. A daily watering can be automat- ed and extremely economic. My water bill has gone up only a few dollars since I start- ed; and during the drought of 1988, while my neighbours were cropless, my plants were a jungle of healthy green.” With a mere expenditure of $150, Johnston added a frame and plastic hot- house to his first box of sawdust and sand to produce tomatoes two months before his neighbours. Each tomato plant, planted seven inches apart, and producing twenty- five to thirty blossoms, gave as many as sixteen pounds of fruit per plant, some individual specimens weighing as much as a pound and a half. The chlorophyll con- tent of the leaves was almost doubled, and they contained so much sugar that insects nibbling on them were killed by an over- dose of alcohol. Johnston uses no insecti- cides. Two hundred strawberry plants in a nar- rower box produced two hundred quarts of strawberries with double the normal sugar content. And just one normal box of bean plants alone is enough to feed a family of four for a year. With cantaloupes clipped onto strings and climbing toward the rafters of the greenhouse, Johnston is able to hang twenty full-sized fruits from each plant. Sawdust and sand form a fluffy consis- tency that allows plenty of essential air and water to reach the roots. But the real NEXUS¢75 DECEMBER 1993 - JANUARY 1994