Tags
Boiling water, Book review, Controlling weeds, ideas, Matthew Levesque, Poison, Promulgating, Selling ideas, Weeds, Worthless
Presenting a multitude of ideas means that most, and probably nearly all, will fail. This blog has presented many good ideas but they had a terrific failing which I am only now beginning to fathom. These ideas wouldn’t succeed because they wouldn’t make anyone any money. And because they wouldn’t make anyone any money, no one would promote them and therefore they wouldn’t proliferate, at least not very far. For an idea to spread it must find a willing mind, and that mind must spread the idea to an absolute minimum of one other mind. Today I came across a perfect example of a wonderful idea that has the failure-prone quality I have been blogging about. In fact, it is all but inevitable that this great new idea will fail.
In The Revolutionary Yardscape by Matthew Levesque on page 79 I read, “”Hot water, boiling hot water, straight out of the teakettle.” It works.”” What an innocuous statement! What it refers to is the killing of weeds. The author was bemoaning in the previous paragraph the killing of weeds with poisonous chemicals. He mentioned in that sentence, buried in the middle of his book, a discovery by his sister-in-law. Apparently this was previously unknown to this deeply committed gardener and therefore to the gardening community.
The reason this simple idea isn’t known broadly is because no one can make any money out of its promulgation. Check out your current Google Search on weed control in lawns. You will see a bunch of money making ads, but I doubt you will find the obvious boiling water technique mentioned on the first page. People can make billions of dollars selling poison, but not one red cent selling the knowledge that pouring boiling water on your weeds will kill them. Also, in addition to being cheap and easy to do, it doesn’t kill anything you don’t pour the boiling water directly onto. Spraying poisons onto one’s weeds can have unexpected effects on your more desirable plants.
I have had a serious dandelion problem in my new home and didn’t want to use poison, so I dug out two 42-gallon plastic bags full by hand. I would very much have appreciated this knowledge a couple of months ago but even a google search wouldn’t have helped much because the opening page is nearly full of poison ads, and after clicking through to the articles, they are also mostly filled with poison ads.
If information won’t make someone money it won’t proliferate.