Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

A couple of Sundays ago I was one of over eight hundred people who packed the Rose Theatre to be entertained by the unexpurgated George Carlin. If I wrote exactly what George said, the Guardian wouldn’t print it so I’ll do my best to suggest at least the gist of the presentation.
It turns out that George and I were born within ten months of each other so that must mean that I’m an Old F too. (not the ‘posterior exhalation’ F, the other F.) I’d noticed that approaching the magic three-score-and-ten had its advantages. I forget my lines and nobody bothers, I wander through the grocery store with zipper unzipped and don’t get arrested. Now I know why: I’m just an Old F!
For the Brampton performance, there wasn’t a whole lot of Bush bashing. Maybe, even for Carlin, laughing at a lame duck is too much like mocking someone for having a limp. But, if the Dubya got off lightly, the nation that allowed him to be president, not once but twice, was excoriated.
According to Carlin, what holds the US together is ‘male bovine exudate’. (if that’s still too graphic for some reader’s delicate sensibility, try moo-moo-poo-poo.) From a long list of jingoistic mmpp slogans to which our neighbours to the south allegedly subscribe, it was ‘Land of the Free’ that came to mind the following morning in a news item.
It was reported that, with less than one-twentieth of the world’s people, the US is home to almost a quarter of the planet’s prison population. As the US ‘justice’ system presently stands, one in three black males, one in six Latino males, and one in seventeen white males, will spend at least some part of their lives incarcerated. Not to show any gender bias, the fastest-growing segment of the US prison population is now female. Land of the Free? Mmpp indeed.
If mmpp is what glues things together, then it is humour that lubricates the passage of unwelcome truths.Although the US provides the like of George Carlin with more material than they can possibly use, Canada is no paragon of virtue or sanity. Our own Rick Mercer can testify to that. In our complacent little world of half-truths, fears and misunderstandings, I’m waiting to hear that a container of pencils has been sent back to China because someone noticed that the pencils contained lead!
Of course, those of us who are gardeners appreciate the real value of mmpp, especially when it is well rotted. The danger lies in not distinguishing the barnyard product from the effluvium produced by slogan writers.Buy peat moss: ‘A renewable resource that cures clay’. No, it is not renewable - unless you wait a few thousand years - and no it doesn’t ‘cure’ anything - the soil is still clay. All excess organic matter does is temporally mask some of clay’s effects. ‘Free lawn aeration.’ That’s about what it’s worth. Likely, the lawn is not compacted to start with, and punching a few finger-sized holes into a clay base is about as good as useless anyway. ‘Have the greenest lawn on your street.’ Why? Do you really want the neighbours to know that you have too much money and not enough awareness of water conservation?
Combating mmpp should not be just an individual affair. If the city was serious about waste reduction, it would enforce a bylaw forbidding the raking of fallen leaves into the street for vacuum collection. Most of the collections are from older areas with larger lots that have ample space to compost everything that the garden produces.
Not that leaves even need composting. After the big leaf fall a couple of weeks ago, while others were dragging leaves out into the gutter, I ran the lawnmower back and forth a few times to shatter the dried up debris so that it could fall between the grass leaves in the lawn. Fallen leaves are not ‘waste’; they are a tree’s way of providing for next year’s needs. Leaf fragments feed chains of numberless soil organisms whose activities deposit nutrients and promote the ingress of gasses essential for plant growth.
Compared to the cupful of fuel it took to shred the leaves in situ, municipal involvement consumes fuel by the barrel. Fuel and manpower for the vacuum machine and the truck to tow it. Fuel for a loader to pack a long-distance van and a tractor to haul it out of town. Fuel to promote accelerated bulk composting. Fuel to sterilize and pack into plastic bags the resulting product. Fuel to ship the bags back to Brampton. Fuel for cars to go and bring bags of compost back to gardens. And for what purpose? Why, to spread on the lawn of course!Am I missing something, or is this just institutionalized mmpp?
If genuine composted cattle manure is really your thing, why not enroll now for the 2008 winter series of free Peel Teaching Garden classes. Rotted-in-the-barnyard compost is available free to students and volunteers. Please see www.teachinggarden.org for more details and for registration.

Day -4 windchill -13 a few flurries Winds SW35km/h P.O.P.40%
Night -14 windchill -23 a few flurries Winds W25km/h P.O.P.40%