Once a garden is contaminated, how does one correct the problem?

Two questions. Where do you get your information on who uses what? What do you know about Timberline sold at Lowes? I use their cow manure/compost frequently.

Omg, just lost 3 different batches of tomatoes repotted with lots of beautiful compost made with a partial amount of my daughters horse poop. As they said, super hot composted and a year later used in repotting the tomatoes in the greenhouse. All started dying 1 day later. Found out grazon was used where she pastures her horses. :( :( evil is right! Turns manure into poison.

yeah, I’m on here as I’m experiencing herbicide damage. I live in East TX, and it has become so contaminated. The stables nearby love to bring manure to all the farmers and gardeners, and I tried some. no bueno. I’m surrounded by “old timers” that are completely clueless. I’m watching my neighbor mix this manure into his garden and with his tractor. He sure can drive a tractor but has no clue about soil.

We have about 80 acres in pasture. Four years ago our co op started a spraying program. Having horses grazon was recommended. I was told it was safe for the horses to stay in the pasture while it was sprayed and even ok for the horses to eat while still wet. I was never told not to compost the manure. Two years ago I started composting manure out of the pasture, this year I started giving it to friends. What a ***** mess. I spent a lot of time with a shovel collecting the manure, turning it, and delivering it to friends. I’ve had two contact me about their gardens and problems they’re having. One of them asked if we were using grazon. This is going to cost me a great deal of time and money to fix. Some are small raised gardens and I’m going to go in and remove and replace the soil. Some are larger, up to an acre, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I’m open to all suggestions. Thanks

Good ? Mr Lunn. One I have asked several times with little results. We used manure that came from cows grazing on pasture with Grazom. Just used it for flowers and pumpkins. We now have some beautiful cantaloupes growing, but wonder are they safe to eat?

David,
Thirteen months ago I was poisoned by Dow Grazon Next when a fitting on my sprayer cracked and sprayed the herbicide all over my back. I had ordered a very mild spray for thistle with a 14 day half life called Du Pont Forefront to use on my hay field. When I went to pick it up the dealer gave me Grazon Next. I objected but he said this is just the same stuff just made by Dow rather than Du Pont. So I believed him and took the product. I woke up the next morning after spraying with my eyes swollen shut and my legs so swollen I couldn’t wear shoes. 2 days later my system tried to push the chemical into my colon for elimination and then it killed all my digestive bacteria. Nothing would digest. I couldn’t sleep because when I would lay down I would throw up. I had no bowel control. The whites of me eyes turned orange. My back looked like I had been shot with a shot gun with every square inch forming an oozing bloody sore. My blood picked the toxin up out of my skin and poisoned every organ in my body. My blood felt radioactively hot and I could feel every heart beat like a pounding drum. I have had 21 blood transfusions in the last 25 weeks and still cannot get it out of my system. It bonds to your blood and organ protein and you cannot filter it out of your system. It’s toxic half life is 1.5 years. My doctor said I will probably need weekly blood transfusions for 4 years before the toxicity breaks down. I called Dow and the EPA. No one knows how to treat it. After 12 weeks and coming very close to death I found a Hemotoligist that had experience treating herbicide poisoning. He said there are only 3 treatments. The first 2 must be administered within 2 days before the 2,4,D bonds to the blood protein, but for me, after 12 weeks, that was no longer an option. The only treatment left is dilution. You remove the toxic blood and replace it with clean blood. This treatment has kept me alive but the treatment is slow. One pint at a time. After 1 year of treatment the toxin is still now killing peripheral nerve tissue by pooling in my hands and feet. My feet are almost completely numb. It has deteriorated my optic nerves and eliminated my ability to taste sweet. This is the Herbicide from Hell. Don’t use it, don’t get near it. If you even get a small amount on your hands you will feel like you are coming down with a bad flue. Warn others. The great crime is that now that Dow has purchased Du Pont, they have changed the name on the Grazon label and are now calling it Forefront. Forefront was the mild thistle specific spray from Du Pont that I thought I was getting. Now that Dow changed the name to increase sales because Forefront was very popular, others are getting the really toxic stuff thinking it is the old mild thistle spray. Farmers are spraying it on their hay for thistle thinking they have a product that is only toxic for 14 days when in fact it stays highly toxic for 1 and 1/2 years. The Grazon lable says you cannot sell the hay the same year you spray it. There was no such warning on the Du Pont Forefront lable. In fact, it said you could graze it 2 weeks after spraying. If you buy hay ask if it was sprayed that year and what with. Changing the name on the label was a very foolish and dangerous move by Dow. Warn others before this becomes a disaster. If you graze cows on a pasture or hay sprayed with it, realize that it doesn’t break down and if you eat the meat you will be poisoning yourself. Beware!!!

We were soooooo ignorant! We quit using straw on our garden years ago because it was all no-till, sprayed with glyposate to dry down before harvesting. Stunted my garlic one year. We switched to hay, purchased from a local good-ol-boys feed store, imported from nearby Tennessee because there’s not a lot of hay available here in the mountains. Things went fine for a few years. Until 2019. We had beautiful tomatoes, raised from seed. Planted about 70 in our high tunnel. A few weeks later, we mulched with hay we purchased. Within a few weeks, I started noticing strange growth–curled leaves, nearly naked stems, fasciation on some stems, cherry tomato branches with hundreds of blossoms. At first I thought it was disease but finally realized it was toxin and the culprit probably the hay. We did get some crop but quit selling to our customers who expect organic produce. We removed the hay and hoped all would go well this year. Three weeks ago, we planted our 2020 crop in the same place. Now I really feel stupid. I didn’t see your post when I researched last year, and didn’t learn about Grazon. A post by U of Georgia sent me looking for Grazon info today and I saw your title from 2015. Our tomatoes are, of course, already showing symptoms. We’ll limp through, but not sell. Our one hope is that I planted our determinate tomatoes in another space outside the tunnel. This space also had some hay mulch which killed my pole beans last year, but it was not under plastic and after removing the contaminated hay, it was exposed to rain all winter. I don’t yet see any sign in these tomatoes, but they were planted two weeks later. Two days ago, I took all my “leftover” tomato plants and made a row out in the open garden where no hay mulch was used. We usually plant tomatoes in tunnels due to blight. I am also planting all of my leftover pepper plants out in the open, uncontaminated garden. Jeez. Our tunnel’s plastic is old. If my determinates do okay in the flushed soil (now recovered with plastic hoophouse), we will be sure to remove the plastic from the high tunnel and let it flush out next winter. I just hope that does it. Sickening.

Well, unless you all are vegan or vegetarians, you are probably toxic yourself by now. They don’t just feed horses hay! Dairy cows, beef cows, goats, you get the picture. It’s in the food supply big time.

This just obliterated my friends garden, she’s a first time gardener and so used her well rotted horse manure, i had no idea horse manure could contain such a wicked ingredient. My heart is absolutely broken for her and I’m very perturbed this herbicide is actually legal to spray in Canada! This is horrifying to think all of our food crops could be wiped out because of this, and how many years will it take to dissipate this poison?

Friends, You all need to get a lawyer and begin a Class Action Lawsuit against the manufacturers of these products. A lawsuit against the maker of glyphosate was successful. The immense distress, grief, and inconvenience caused is staggering, not to mention the financial expenses. If I am not mistaken Grazon contains 2,4-D. Is not this related to Agent Orange and Dioxins?

Do you think mushroom soil would have this contaminate in it as well. I usually get a few loads every few years to top dress my garden, now I’m skeptical of even doing that. I don’t understand why they are permited to sell something that will end up in our food chain. It’s just so sad

Once charcoal has absorbed the Grazon, what happens then? Does it stay there? Do I have to collect the contaminated Charcoal? How? Charcoal is also recommended as moisture buffer, absorbing and releasing moisture. Together with Grazon?

David, I cannot thank you enough. We moved from Alaska to begin to build a small farm from scratch in eastern Tennessee. I had read something about this in Mother Earth News, most likely something you wrote, a few years before the move. But by the time we got here and began building up the yellow clay soil, I couldn’t remember the name of the active ingredient or the brand name of the herbicide.
We hired a local guy to bring us a dump truck full of aged manure. He insisted that that is what he had brought us, but it didn’t look or smell right. There was a ton of sawdust in it, which obviously cows don’t eat. Sawdust really locks up available nitrogen in the soil while it is breaking down and we needed it NOW. It ended up being spent mushroom compost. We got it in the fall to be the beginning of a monster compost pile (big dreams need lots of compost). After figuring out what it was, we decided to let it sit for a full season to let the sawdust /nitrogen break down. Also with the hopes we wouldn’t introduce fungal diseases to our new orchard and garden. Thank God for that sawdust and the delay it caused. Didn’t think of herbicides. We used black kow that first season. At the end of season two, we began considering using the “manure”/mushroom compost and were struck by the complete lack of weed growth when we expected the mound to be covered by a weed jungle. We used some to fertilize some other baby trees but then we began to finally wonder why there were no weeds in that pile. Then I remembered that M.E. News article. Delayed mental acuity… we were spared the worst of the poisoning because it was only applied to a few trees before our brains belatedly kicked into gear. The apple tree leaves curled soon after and now five years later, while most of the trees are 15 feet tall, those few trees are stunted at three feet and have slowly died or have been removed. I’ve noticed some of the replacements are not doing much better. If the new ones fail we’ll need to dig out the holes and replace the soil. Our native soil is so lousy. We have to be able to add fertility without resorting to chemicals and options are limited or so expensive as to be being out of reach. My partner brings home old hay from local farmers after relentless questioning. Same with manure. Most of the time people don’t know what we’re talking about. So now we keep our compost on the backside of a hill where run off won’t potentially reach our orchard or garden. We let it sit and Jim mixes it with the tractor from time to time to ensure reasonable distribution. Then the year before we plan on using it and before we distribute the compost around the property, we look and see how happy are the weeds growing on the piles. So far so good. We’ll try the bean test.
I think we’ve been fortunate because we live in an economically depressed area and the grazon is expensive. I know some hay farmers only spot spray problem areas to save on costs. This logically means the contamination might not permeate the entire hay field or even an entire bale of hay, or, based on what the cattle eats that all the manure is contaminated, or contaminated equally. Which is why Jim mixes it. One reason is dilution. The other, if the compost is partially contaminated how can we know which part is safe and what is not. All we know to do is to minimize. This is such an imperfect solution to our screaming need for compost. As we’ve gradually been accepted into the farming community we find people with cattle (we always avoid horse manure as weed seeds pass through their digestive tract intact causing way too much work weeding) that grow their own hay. Those cattlemen know exactly what’s on their hay. (All bets are off during drought and hay crop failures. Everyone is buying hay at that point.,) Always try to find good sources from honest people that know the history of what their livestock eat. It’s not a formal thing or farmers wanting to keep crazy records. They just know their fields and the fields of their friends and what is or isn’t sprayed on them. These farmers are few and far between,but there are still some out there that are paying attention. Sorry this is so long. Hopes it helps.