Haz-Mat License Optional?
Old Book Offers Intriguing Tips For the Garden

A few weeks ago my wife decided that our dining room just wasn't working for us.

We usually have our meals in the kitchen and only once or twice a year would we actually use the dining room for dining. It seemed like a waste of space.

The room -- like much of our 95-year-old home -- has "decorating challenges" that you might not see in a newer dwelling. Our dining room is not a tidy rectangle, but more of a square with one corner clipped off. There are 4 entryways into the room and it acts as a hallway for much of our home's first floor. The south wall of the room is a large glass bay composed of three windows with an equally large, built-in window seat beneath them.

But my wife -- using furniture and various decor we already had on hand -- has repurposed the space into our own private coffee-shop-like reading room. It's quite comfortable. It's like being at Starbucks, but without all the laptops.

Last Sunday morning I was enjoying my newspaper and coffee in this room when The Cat decided she needed some lap-time.

Lap-time with The Cat can be 10 minutes or 2 hours or -- as it was on this occasion -- something in between. I quickly finished reading the newspaper and being one to not sit idle -- but also not wanting to disturb The Snoozing Cat -- I looked around for something else to occupy my time.

As a part of the room-makeover, my wife has lined up a small collection of vintage gardening books on the window seat -- now being used as a giant coffee table -- conveniently close to my chair. I could reach these without bothering The Snoozing Cat.

The book I pulled from the collection was The Complete Book of Garden Magic. This particular edition was from 1956, but the original printing -- and the bulk of the book's content -- was from 1936.

I quickly realized that many of the recommended garden solutions from the 1930's would likely require some kind of a haz-mat license in today's world.

For instance, some of the suggested products for fertilizing your lawn back then were "sewer sludge, blood, and tankage."

While it would perhaps not require a hazardous material license, I'm pretty sure my neighbors would not be too thrilled if I spread sewage around my yard, but I bet my grass would look fantastic! And I'm not sure where I would even find enough blood to be effective for my size lawn.

I suppose I could call the Red Cross and check into acquiring their left-over old stock, but they would probably think I was just another a vampire-wannabe rather than a serious gardener.

I had never heard of the term "tankage" prior to reading this book. I looked its definition up and found that it is "the residue from tanks in which carcasses and other offal have been steamed and the fat has been rendered."

I'm guessing it ranks right up there with "sewer sludge" in things your neighbors DON'T want you applying to your lawn.

The book touted arsenate of lead as a great way to kill grubs. And moles could be done in using calcium cyanide powder or peanuts laced with strychnine. I imagine that if you even attempted to acquire any of these substances that someone from the Department of Homeland Security would be paying you a visit.

The book also offered some interesting solutions for taking care of weed problems. It suggested stabbing dandelions with rods dipped in sulphuric or nitric acid. While these may have been easy to acquire in the 1930's, using the latter improperly can result in an explosion according to Wikipedia and the former is regulated by the DEA. Sulphuric acid is used in the manufacturer of meth.

The author also recommended sodium chlorate as a weed killer although he acknowledged it was an "extreme fire hazard." Gasoline was also discussed for this job, but the author "never found it particularly efficient."

But gasoline and kerosene were both endorsed as an effective way of getting rid of ants. Soak their hills, drop a match and run. No suggestion of having a hose handy was offered.

Reading the content from this vintage book actually made me appreciate the fact that a lot of these handy garden "solutions" are not so easily accessible to the general populace any more or they've been packaged in moderation or they have fallen out of favor.

Imagine if soaking an anthill with gas was still the preferred method of eradication…

…Well, you know an ounce or two of gas just wouldn't be sufficient. This is America and we love our things "super-sized." If an ounce is good, a gallon must be at least twice or maybe even three times as good.

After a few visits to the gas station -- I've got several gas cans, but not enough to hold 20 gallons in one trip -- and a thorough dousing of the anthills scattered around my property including one particularly large mound located in the flowerbed beneath our bay window which I gave an extra dousing since it was so gosh-darned big -- the only thing left to do would be to light a match and …

…I guess having no bay window could be considered a "decorating challenge."