Gus and horse drawn milk wagons

When I was a little girl, housewives waited until the milk wagon had passed and the horse had passed too. They would scoot out into the road with a six quart fruit basket and scoop the poop for their gardens. I miss the milk wagons, the six quart baskets and a horse named Queenie. I was not excited about the rest until I found I had to pay $10 a bag for it for our garden.

When I was on the board of governors at Brandon University, I sat next to a retired CPR engineer named Gus Hendzel. Now that man had gardens! He also had two greenhouses and he spent his time experimenting with all and sundry to find new ways of making his gardens even better.

I was visiting Gus and his wife one day. Naturally, we ended up in the greenhouse. He had a dozen geraniums in pots. He picked up one from one row and showed me its root system. Nothing spectacular. Then he showed me one from another row and wow, that geranium was on its way to being root bound. He had started all of the geraniums at the same time. What was the secret?

Gus told me to cut 12 foot-long branches , about an inch thick, from any willow tree and strip off the bark. He said to put the bark in something plastic and cover the strips of bark with water. After 24 hours, I poured the resulting 'tea' into a big jar with a lid. He said to use one cup of the willow tea in one watering can and try it on our vegetables. I watered one row of tomatoes with the tea concoction and the next with water. The plants in the row drinking the tea had spectacular roots, were bigger and produced more tomatoes than the plants in the 'water only' row. It is only necessary to use the tea water once in a season. Use plain water after that.

Gus guaranteed that if I used a pail of water with a cup of the tea in it whenever I planted a tree, the tree would grow.

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The botany types from the university were fascinated. The university received a million dollar grant to try to isolate the hormone so it could be produced synthetically as fertilizer for grains. If there was a drought, the plants would still succeed because they had nice long roots down where the water was.

Give it a try if it interests you. There are always willow trees near a river.

Meanwhile, dig your fingernails into a bar of soap before you head out to the garden and you won't spend forever cleaning your nails like I did today because I forgot. Do you have some gardening secrets? Our garden needs all the help we can get.