The girls, Heidi and Selma, on a hike in Brazil

TEXT FROM WALKABOUT

After lunch I got reacquainted, after all the years since my childhood, with gardening without
herbicides. If you don’t want to spray poison on your garden, nor spend money on propane gas to singe the weeds, you have to pull them. And if you don’t have the robots to do it for you, you do the pulling by hand. It’s backbreaking work, but it leaves a very nice-looking result.

I also found out what you do to avoid using pesticides: you combine every crop with the right companion plants.

The companion plants either repel the bugs or taste better to them than the food plants, and the latter stay healthy.

From Grandpa's book

TEXT FROM WALKABOUT

All life on land and in lakes and rivers, as well as all higher life
forms in the seas, died instantly or almost instantly. Years later,
after the smoke from this planetary conflagration would have cleared,
the vastly increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would
raise the temperature of the sea enough to kill all remaining life
except the ecosystems in the deepest abysses of the oceans and along
the mid-ocean ridge, sustained by anaerobic bacteria living around
volcanic vents. On land, the only surviving organisms were similar
anaerobic bacteria in bedrock, sometimes found over 3 miles down,
along with the indestructible tardigrade.

From Grandpa's book