When it comes to Frontline’s “The Vaccine War” – and vaccines in general – it seems the part about “credible” and “unbiased” is in short supply.

First, a couple of caveats: I have not yet seen this show. I’m not a doctor, just a (very) part time blogger and (very) full time dad. And I’ve always admired Frontline for being one the best journalism shows TV.

That said I got an email this morning from the NJ Alliance for Informed Choice in Vaccination (NJAIC) containing the note that Dr. Jay Gordon, who had been interviewed for the Frontline episode, and subsequently dropped from the final cut, wrote to Kate McMahon, the producer of “The Vaccine War”. And it gives me some pause when it comes to my prior admiration for Frontline.

The full note is long but so compelling I’ve posted the whole shebang below; it’s also available on Dr. Jay Gordon’s own website:

Dear Mary,

Last night, PBS aired a show called “The Vaccine War.” I was interviewed at great length and in great depth about vaccines and my point of view and expressed my ambivalence about the polarization of this issue and the need for more calm reasoned discussion about the number one question that new parents have. I told Kate McMahon, the co-producer of the show, that there was a large group of doctors and others who cannot be dismissed with the facile label “anti-vaccine” because we still give vaccines and see a place for them in the practice of medicine, but we do not agree with the current vaccine schedule nor the number of vaccines children receive all at one time.

A few days ago, Ms.McMahon emailed me to tell me that the decision had been made to omit my interview from the show. There would not be one word from me. She didn’t tell me that she had also omitted 100% of Dr. Robert Sears’ interview. And that any other comments from physicians supporting the parents on the show in their ambivalence about vaccines or their decision to refuse all vaccines would also be omitted.

She left this as a show with many doctors commenting very negatively, very frighteningly and often disdainfully and dismissively about vaccine “hesitation” as they called it.

Dear Kate,

The “Frontline” show was disgraceful. You didn’t even have the courtesy to put my interview or any part of the two hours we spent taping on your web site.

You created a pseudo-documentary with a preconceived set of conclusions: “Irresponsible moms against science” was an easy takeaway from the show.

No one pursued Dr. Offit’s response about becoming rich from the vaccine he invented. He was allowed to slide right by that question without any follow up. Dr. Paul Offit did not go into vaccine research to get rich. He is a scientist motivated by his desire to help children. But his profiting tens of millions of dollars from the creation of this vaccine and the pursuit of sales of this and other vaccines is definitely not what he says it is. His many millions “don’t matter” he says. And you let it go.

Jenny McCarthy resumed being a “former Playboy” person and was not acknowledged as a successful author, actress and mother exploring every possible avenue to treating her own son and the children of tens of thousands of other families.

I trusted you by giving you two or three hours of my time for an interview and multiple background discussions. I expressed my heartfelt reservations about both vaccines and the polarizing of this issue into “pro-vaccine” and “anti-vaccine” camps. I told you that there was at least a third “camp.” There are many doctors and even more parents who would like a more judicious approach to immunization. Give vaccines later, slower and with an individualized approach as we do in every other area of medicine.

What did you create instead?

“The Vaccine War.”

A war. Not a discussion or a disagreement over facts and opinions, but a war. This show was unintelligent, dangerous and completely lacking in the balance that you promised me–and your viewers–when you produced and advertised this piece of biased unscientific journalism. “Tabloid journalism” I believe is the epithet often used. Even a good tabloid journalist could see through the screed you’ve presented.

You interviewed me, you spent hours with Dr. Robert Sears of the deservedly-illustri ous Sears family and you spoke to other doctors who support parents in their desire to find out what went wrong and why it’s going wrong and what we might do to prevent this true epidemic.

Not a measles epidemic, not whooping cough. Autism. An epidemic caused by environmental triggers acting on genetic predisposition. The science is there and the evidence of harm is there. Proof will come over the next decade. The National Children’s Study will, perhaps by accident, become a prospective look at many children with and without vaccines. But we don’t have time to wait for the results of this twenty-one year research study: We know that certain pesticides cause cancer and we know that flame retardants in children’s pajamas are dangerous. We are cleaning up our air and water slowly and parents know which paint to buy and which to leave on the shelves when they paint their babies’ bedrooms.

The information parents and doctors don’t have is contained in the huge question mark about the number of vaccines, the way we vaccinate and the dramatic increase in autism, ADD/ADHD, childhood depression and more. We pretend to have proof of harm or proof of no harm when what we really have is a large series of very important unanswered questions.

In case you were wondering, as I practice pediatrics every day of my career, I base nothing I do on Dr. Wakefield’s research or on Jenny McCarthy’s opinions. I respect what they both have done and respectfully disagree with them at times. I don’t think that Dr. Wakefield’s study proved anything except that we need to look harder at his hypothesis. I don’t think that Jenny McCarthy has all the answers to treating or preventing autism, but there are tens of thousands of parents who have long needed her strong high-profile voice to draw attention to their families’ needs: Most families with autism get inadequate reimbursement for their huge annual expenses and very little respect from the insurance industry, the government or the medical community. Jenny has demanded that a brighter light be shone on their circumstances, their frustration and their needs.

I base everything I do on my reading of CDC and World Health Organization statistics about disease incidence in the United States and elsewhere. I base everything I do on having spent the past thirty years in pediatric practice watching tens of thousands of children get vaccines, not get vaccines and the differences I see.

Vaccines change children.

Most experts would argue that the changes are unequivocally good. My experience and three decades of observation and study tell me otherwise. Vaccines are neither all good–as this biased, miserable PBS treacle would have you believe–nor all bad as the strident anti-vaccine camp argues.

You say the decisions to edit 100% of my interview from your show (and omit my comments from your website) “were purely based on what’s best for the show, not personal or political, and the others who didn’t make it came from both sides of the vaccine debate.” You are not telling the truth. You had a point to prove and removed material from your show which made the narrative balanced. “Distraught, confused moms against important, well-spoken calm doctors” was your narrative with a deep sure voice to, literally, narrate the entire artifice.

You should be ashamed of yourself, Kate. You knew what you put on the air was slanted and you cheated the viewers out of an opportunity for education and information. You cheated me out of hours of time, betrayed my trust and then you wasted an hour of PBS airtime. Shame on you.

The way vaccines are manufactured and administered right now in 2010 makes vaccines and their ingredients part of the group of toxins which have led to a huge increase in childhood diseases including autism. Your show made parents’ decisions harder and did nothing except regurgitate old news.

Parents and children deserve far better from PBS.

Jay Gordon, MD, FAAP

Take Action

If this makes you as ticked off as me, you can write the PBS Ombudsman about the lack of “journalistic integrity” of this show here: http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback.html.

Because I’m a fanatic, that’s why.

Doesn’t matter that I’m 42 years old, that people all over the world are struggling with serious problems of life and death. The head knows that these are things that should make us all sick to the soul; the heart only says “but the Mets blew it…again.”

My sister – a Yankees fan – once asked me to come up with a good metaphor to describe the feeling you get when your team’s season ends with bitter disappointment. I told her it was like having your heart broken. It’s like when you’re a kid and that girl you’re nuts about calls you out of the blue and says “see ya around.” The baseball season runs day after day for months; you live and die with those guys night after night. You can’t help but get to know the personality of the team in what can only be described as an intimate way. When your team wins it all, you never lose them, because they’ll come back every anniversary to re-live the season. When your team loses, then they go away. You never see them again.

So when the Mets season ends with a tough loss the whole world turns thin, gray and bleak. For a few weeks, anyway.

After a few weeks you realize that holding emotional water for a baseball team is pretty ridiculous, and anyway the Mets are in the running for that off-season’s big free agent. So you start reading MetsBlog again, and glancing at the sports page for trades now and then, and pretty soon it’s Christmas and the pain fades.

But it does take it a while. Those first few days are rough, and sad beyond expression. That’s what it’s like right now for this fanatical Mets fan.

What makes this year particularly gut-kicking is that the Mets loss coincides with the last game at Shea Stadium, and so it’s a double dip of heartbreak. My grandfather took me and my two cousins to Shea Stadium in 1977; last year I took my own daughter there. We did the whole thing – the train into NYC, the Number 7 subway out of Grand Central to the last stop, loaded with Mets fans juiced up for the game. When the car rounded that last bend near Willets Point and the blue hunk of Shea rose into view, I watched as her seven-year-old eyes opened in amazement, just like mine on my first trip, when I kept asking my grandfather what all that green grass was doing outside of the field, until he told me that all that green grass WAS the field, and I couldn’t believe the enormity of the place.

It all came full circle. So that’s special.

And now Shea’s gone too, taking another bitter Mets season with it. The reality is that Shea Stadium sucks – a leaky, smelly, cracked concrete dump; sitting there you feel trapped between those thick metal rails between the seats, and the bathroom’s are a mess, to put it nicely – but it was home. My grandfather’s there. My daughter’s first game will always be there. I can’t easily say good riddance to the place.

But considering that the Mets haven’t won a World Series in 22 years, maybe there’s something positive here. Maybe Shea used up its magic in 1986, the last Mets World Series win, when they pulled off the greatest, most improbable come-from-behind feat ever. Maybe the new place, with it’s reminiscence of Ebbets Field will bring its own brand of new Mets Magic. We’ll have to see.

Meantime, I’m just waiting for the next two weeks to pass by. I mean, the Mets still have great, young players, and great pitching, and if we only get a few relievers, well, just wait ‘till next year.

Just another day among my fellow citizens in the public square. And I ask you: Is this information we need to help us build fulfilled lives? Does it better our democracy?

No. It’s cheap entertainment. And since it comes by way of other people’s misery, (hurricanes, floods, unsolvable dilemmas), it’s entertainment at another’s expense, and for cable news profits.

That, dear readers, is called exploitation.

About a year back I had to go to the local cable TV store, the place where you exchange a busted remote or set-top box. And there they were: Three TVs tuned to Lifetime, keeping the folk well sedated during the wait, I suppose. They were running some sappy “romance” movie, and a woman was being raped and beaten while we stood there watching.

It was the most surreal event you can imagine – not just because a woman was being sexually abused before our eyes, but that most people yawned and scratched themselves as if nothing was wrong with it.

Why is it OK that people are raped, pillaged and beaten across 500 channels all day long and it’s OK with us? What’s happened to our sense of perspective? And why must we – and our kids – be subjected to this junk at public spaces? More and more you run into television intruding onto our public world. My bank’s got them, the doctor’s office uses them, even the diner I used to like put them up. We don’t eat meals in my house with the television on; why would I go to a restaurant to sit dumbly in front of one there?

This is one of those political arguments that transcends party. Right-wing, left-wing, we ought to all feel outrage over the excesses of commercial entertainment and its intrusion into our private lives. (And if you want some warm and fuzzies check out Mr. Obama’s eloquence on media and kids here.) That’s why I also love organizations like White Dot, in the UK, a country which frankly is miles ahead of the US in terms of recognizing the negative impact of media on our lives. You can even choose a “media-free” car on the London-Heathrow train. Imagine that.

I think the awareness in the US is starting to jell. Although – sadly – the website for TVTurnoff appears to have gone dark, the Center for Screen Time Awareness seems to have picked up the slack. (If anyone has information on either of these sites, please let me know.) Many people I know profess embarrassment at watching TV, a welcomed sign-of-the-times. Still, the next time you enter a public space and there’s a TV blaring away, just zap the thing with your TV-B-Gone. And help bring a little more peace into the world.

If you want to know why I can tell you about my grandfather, his coming from Russia to New York, his love for the NY Giants and the hours we spent together watching the Mets. Or my own psychology behind my letting a baseball team’s loss ruin my good mood when there’s plenty of other disasters in the world that ought to do a better job. But the bottom line is that I’ve been a Mets fan all my life and that’s that.

If you follow the sport or if you live near a big-media zone like New York, you know the madness that can surround a team when the media smells trouble. In the 70s the Yankees had the Bronx Zoo, a daily soap opera among Reggie, Billy, and The Boss. Embarrassing, really. But I didn’t care – I kind of reveled in watching the hated – and perpetually winning – Yankees roil through turmoil, especially because my team was so terrible at the time.

But that was the tame 70s. Who knew how insane the media circus would become, with blogs, social media, and the wild appetite for celebrity news? I’m 41 years old now. I have zero interest in celebrities lives or celebrity gossip. It’s just more bread and circuses.

Yet now this same media concentration is swallowing up sports. The news around the Mets recently (recent winning streak aside) has read more like something out of Us Magazine than Sports Illustrated. Headlines had been railing about the “firestorm” over what the manager said, what the closer said, what the first baseman didn’t say. ESPN spent multiple innings covering this junk during a Sunday night game, with tight closeups of players’ faces as they “struggle” to overcome the “stress” of playing through the turmoil.

Gimme a break. What is this, high school? I’m a fan of the game on the field, the thinking-person’s part of the game. Strategizing along with the manager. The anticipation; not what’s happening but what’s ABOUT to happen. This is what makes baseball so excruciatingly wonderful.

“He said, she said” is not a game that interests me. At all.

Truth is my 30-year love affair with the Mets – with baseball – has been in jeopardy for while, mostly due to the endless stream of advertising that they slip into every possible nook and cranny of a broadcast. The DVR lets you skip the ever-lengthening commercials between innings but there’s little escape from the in-game interruptions, the “pitching change brought to you by…” or “the game-time temperature,” or “this broken bat” or “spit through the teeth” and on and on. But now the celebritizing of the game makes me pretty much skip the Sports page, the pre-game show and the all-sports radio station here in NY, WFAN. I still watch the game itself but the love affair is being killed off by the endless product pitch and non-sports related carping out of the maddening media. Who needs it?

Anyone who reads this blog knows about my passion for shutting out commercial infotainment, which uses emotional manipulation to push a seductive agenda of satisfaction through purchase. Meantime, we grow more ignorant about government shenanigans because fewer of us are paying attention, or getting real news. But I always excluded sports media from this mix, which in some ways has represented a very honest model of media taking those in charge to task. Imagine if the President had to face a room full of reporters asking key strategic questions about that day’s administrative decisions without any concern for being “fair” or “balanced”? Or if we as citizens spent our time on the radio like sports talk listeners do, arguing about real issues that really mattered, instead of “value” issues about pastors or flag pins or gay marriage diversions that represent the appearance of debate.

Sports coverage and sports radio has always seemed to be the most democratic discussions on the commercial dial, because it transcends political ideology for the bottom line: winning. So while I rail about “smashing the TV” on this blog the truth is I’ve kept mine running because I watch baseball, my last excuse for keeping the thing.

I’m starting to rethink that now. And so that noise you next hear might be my foot aimed squarely at the center of my Sony.

I watched hours and hours and hours of television.

And here I am, 41 years old and a somewhat well-adjusted member of society. So what’s my deal with the endless rants about smashing the TV?

Here’s the thing: There was a difference between commercial entertainment then and the media monstrosity we’ve got now. A big difference. Spending hours at the mercy of mellow 70′s passive entertainment – on maybe five different channels, tops – is admittedly troubling, and may be the reason I never became a lawyer, let’s say. Ultimately not the best way to spend a childhood (God knows).

But: Spending hours and hours (and hours) with hyper-realistic, psychologically manipulative, adult-oriented, sexualized, super-violent, and emotionally intrusive material – across 500 channels or whatever – is a whole different thing. And that’s what we’ve got today. In the 70′s watching too much television was a troubling social concern. Today it really does threaten our democracy.

Of course, we can’t look back at newsreels from the 50s without cracking up at the horn-rimmed, slicked-hair squares bemoaning the “dangers of rock ‘n roll”. Turns out Elvis wasn’t the end of civilization as we knew it, after all.

But it’s a whole new ballgame today. Just consider the sneering, nasty tone of commercial entertainment, which alone is enough to make us want to toss the thing in the closet and run to the nearest library. That’s even before we consider the disinformation that passes for “news” (70% of Americans blamed Iraq for 9/11 – enough said) or the consumerist blatherings that spin us into thinking that a fulfilled life is defined by a pursuit for self-gratification. And I’m just getting started.

Popular culture can be – and has been – truly great, and even great art. But when it exists as part of a pre-conceived marketing plan, it’s manipulative junk. More and more of today’s commercial entertainment – which after all comes by way of a shrinking handful of media conglomerates – carries a “hidden agenda”. It’s getting harder to know what’s really being sold with the entertainment we’re getting, with viral videos of “amateurs” that turn out to be music label plants on YouTube, or “news” shows that do in-depth “features” of films produced by another department of the television network. Or military “experts” who appear objective but are planted, pro-war messengers instead.

Democracy remains the best form of social arrangement we’ve got. But just as businesses need well-defined property laws or a well-run postal system in order to operate best, democracies require a well-informed public that can make thoughtful, wise decisions. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? We could end up with a president we want to share a beer with instead of a well-qualified leader. Shudder. Just imagine what might happen in a world like that.

Let me tell you, there is nothing more frustrating and – I’ll admit it – frightening than watching a parent’s chances reduced to what their insurance will or (more often) won’t cover. You’re standing in a hospital as if you’re talking about a car transmission but it’s your father that’s sitting there in a daze. And it comes down to is this: If he can pay, he can live. If he can’t, he may not.

We’ve assigned our very existence a dollar value.

This is totally nuts. After all, OUR government ought to take care of OUR needs. But take a look at recent American history objectively and you’d think that our government’s main purpose is to simply fight more effective and aggressive wars. We’ve forgotten that government exists because theoretically, a centralized authority representing the will of the majority is supposed to address our needs better than might be possible for us as individuals. But 25 years of conservative government – topped off with a $3 trillion war – has brought us to the edge of financial ruin. We can’t take care of people who need help because – as Vonnegut used to say – we’re too damned cheap. Or maybe it’s that we’ve handed over our democracy to a minority corporate power whose interests are not aligned with just about everyone else.

Meantime, you have to hold your breath as you drive over another rusted, tumbledown overpass or past another dying city, while we can’t even provide life-saving care when it’s needed most. Something is very, very wrong here.

So where’s the mass outrage? There ought to be marching in the streets by now. Maybe the general indifference can be blamed on the corporate media, which redirects justified anger towards paper tigers, like “communists” or “liberals” or “the clash of civilizations.” At the same time we soak our brains in hours of commercial entertainment which has one sole aim: To get us to fill our homes with more stuff, to think about our next car or ‘gotta have it’ gadget, as if things will give meaning and provide contentment to our lives. They never do. But we keep falling for it, time after time. It’s easy to forget that life is for living, not just an opportunity to go shopping.

The bottom line is that it’s not “other people” who need affordable, comprehensive health care. It’s everyone: Our parents, our kids, our best friends. Someday, inevitably, it’ll be you and me.

This is a site about progressive change. So I’ll end this post on a positive note: Maybe it’s time to “unplug and de-program” ourselves; turn off the media manipulations and re-focus on the things that matter. And convince your neighbor to do the same thing.

Resources

There are many organizations working to address our sick health care situation. Here are a few:

• HealthCare Now
• Guaranteed Healthcare (check the petition for “CheneyCare”)
• Nine-Nine-Oh-Nine: Healthcare for ALL by 9/9/09

’68 was a pivotal year for Hollywood films; movie makers had finally shaken off the “moral” limitations of the Production Code and started taking on cultural taboos in a more direct – and honest – manner. It kicked off a Hollywood artistic revival that lasted about ten years and included some of the best films ever made, right up until The Blockbusters in the mid-seventies when Uni-Studio came along and ate up the movies.

I don’t know if movies can change the world but really good ones can push things along once in a while.

Here’s a clip from In the Heat of the Night, one of the all-time great films, and starring the always elegant Sidney Poitier. The clip here has been referred to as “the slap heard round the world” and I think you’ll see why:

That’s Rod Steiger as the sherrif and I understand he tried that “I don’t know” line eighteen times until he got it right. He sure does get it right. I’ve also heard Poitier explain that in the original script, his character was supposed to take that slap with the typical stoicism expected of black characters in a Hollywood film. But he refused to play it that way and the result is a watershed moment. Hope you enjoy.

Keep corporate entertainment away from my kids.

I’ve really had it with the corporate media’s entertainment bread and circuses. My kids are unplugged for the most part and I hope to keep it that way. Today they’re fun-loving, confident children; why should I watch as their self-worth is destroyed by their worrying over how thin they are, or how thick their lips are, or other meaningless trivialities? The sexualization of young girls in the media is truly frightening for anyone with children. It can lead to all kinds of psychological disorders, according to the APA. But honestly, we don’t need a press release to understand these things.

I want my children to take pride in their capabilities. I want them to be mindful about things that matter, about how kind they are, about how they should treat their friends. These values are mostly absent from anything that pops out of the tube or sits on the magazine rack at the checkout counter. They’re certainly missing from commercial entertainment.

Spend an hour with corporate entertainment and the one thing that you walk away with is the cheapness of everything. It’s everywhere, in the snide, snappy, mean-spirited digs in commercials or sitcoms; in many movies, which have “gun tracks” instead of music tracks – how many murders can one person watch in two hours? This cheapness leaves the impression that “nothing really matters”. But things DO matter. There really are implications to our actions. When you live in a commercial-infused TV reality, it’s very easy to lose sight of this.

Corporate advertisers know exactly what they’re doing; they go after our kids, exploiting young minds who’ve yet to develop the skills to understand that advertising is not “the truth” but rather a manipulation. Advertisers recognize this phenomenon and even boast about doing it. When you manipulate minors for your own benefit and at their expense, well, that’s called molestation under any other situation and I think that’s what commercial TV is doing to kids. We have laws in the US against this kind of thing; why should it be OK when it comes in the form of cartoony characters?

We have drug-free school zones; how about commercial-free school zones too?

I’m all for free speech – passionately – but this is not a free speech issue. I know there are plenty of “small government” folks who don’t agree with regulations, and besides it’s hard to imagine the kinds of laws that exist in other countries being passed here in the US to control advertising to children. But we can do the next best thing by turning our backs on the thing. If you have kids you should take pride in keeping commercial TV away from them.

Maybe if more people understood the danger to kids from TV they would simply turn it off. Imagine if 25 million – 50 million – just millions and millions of Americans unplugged themselves from corporate entertainment as a protest. What a message that would send!

Here’s a social experiment to try. There are few things more frightening – enlightening? – than NOT watching commercial entertainment for a set period, say three months, and then taking a peek. You’ll be amazed, believe me. I’ve done it.

What do you think? Leave a comment!

If you’re interested in this topic here are a few resources to browse:

• Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood
• New American Dream (their page on Kids and Commercialism is outstanding)
• Commercial Alert has a Parents’ Bill of Rights petition to send Congress

Keep McDonald’s and their poisonous pitches away from my kids.

It’s bad enough that kids are blasted with TV advertising every day (the average child watches more than 40,000 television commercials per year; warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it?) Add in the highway signs, the checkout counter, the doctor’s office, the buses passing by…our kids being consumed.

Thing is, children don’t have the brain-processing skills to understand advertising, which they see as “truthful, accurate and unbiased.” It’s like giving solid food to an infant; they’ve yet to develop teeth to take it in.

This is explicitly understood by the advertisers themselves, who are dumping $15 billion per year on advertising to children. What’s the result? The most over-weight, over-materialistic, over-manipulated generation ever imagined. Ever wondered how 70% of Americans got duped into thinking Iraq was responsible for 911?

Maybe because they saw it on TV.

The good news is that parents are catching on, and fighting back. Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood – along with nearly 2000 parent complaints – just got McDonald’s to end their advertising campaign on report cards (yes, freaking report cards). They had been promising “a free Happy Meal to students with good grades, behavior, or attendance”. You’ve got to see this thing to believe it.

When I was a kid we had Dick and Jane. But there’s nothing like that smilin’ face of Ronald McDonald to make you think “learn kids!”

Way to go to the families of Seminole County, Florida…

But the frightening thing is that those pesticides have a devastating impact on our health and planetary welfare. You don’t have to read Silent Spring;just Google “pesticide lawn care danger” and see for yourself. Alternative Lawn Care has a nice, frightening summary, or check out Safelawns, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting natural lawn care, which has some great resources.

Anyway, since I’m always pushing organic, sustainable, green approaches to modern living, I figure I have a responsibility to prove it with a green, healthy weed-free lawn. And I’ve been able to do this with alternative, non-toxic, organic fertizers. They’re pretty cheap, very easy to use, and really do the trick. You just put the stuff down a few times in spring and summer, and that’s it.

Now, I’m a busy guy, fulltime job, two kids; finding an hour just to mow the lawn is challenging enough. Pulling weeds is not going to happen. What’s beautiful about organic weed control is that these products (I’ve provided links below) follow a preemergence model; this means that you put it on before weeds sprout. You use these as a replacement for “weed and feed” products that traditional garden centers sell.

The magical thing about this – and it is truly magical, if you ask me – is that corn gluten meal, a by-product of cornstarch manufacturing, inhibits seed growth naturally. I don’t know if you’d want to eat the stuff, but it’s totally safe to have around yourself, your kids, your pets and the planet. And it makes a beautiful green lawn to boot.

There’s a nice overview of the science behind corn gluten meal here; the only warning I’ve seen is for folks with corn allergies.

There are several ways to use these products, and the manufactures often suggest alternating treatments between their weed preventer and their natural fertilizers. But I’ve had very good success just using the weed preventer by itself, because it also includes lawn food (the “feed” side of weed and feed). I start early in spring, just before the forsythia bloom (I’m in central New Jersey, which is zone 7), and before the crabgrass starts (this will be the last you see of that stuff too, trust me). For me, this is around the second or third week of March; I’ve also waited until early April with success.

At the same time, you can really put this down at any time in the summer. In my experience weeds seem to come in waves; there’s usually one that hits around June. So it’s never too late to use.

To put it down you use a standard fertilizer spreader; the weed control manufactures often suggest which settings to use according to your spreader type. You can’t use too much of the stuff; it’s so mild there’s no chance of “burning” your lawn. It’s best to do this on a day it may rain, but in truth I’ve never worried too much about this. The stuff starts breaking down in a few days, and you’ll know because it smells, well, none too appetizing, let’s say. To me, this is the only drawback. A minor inconvenience.

Then you wait about five weeks and do it again. I try for two applications per season.

And that’s it; the only other lawn maintenance I do in early spring is to aerate the yard with those funky spiked shoes (just do a Google search for Lawn Aerator Shoes). True, the neighbors may think you’re nuts as you walk across your lawn but it does start conversations. So think of it as community building.

Now I’m just waiting for a neighbor to drop a complement, at which point I can whip out my stash of Cockadoodle Doo, or Wow! Plus and tell ‘em they could eat their lunch off the lawn, if they wanted to. And their dog won’t drop dead from walking through the backyard, either.

Resources

There are many places to find corn gluten meal on the web; here are a few:

• Corn Gluten Meal from Amazon
• Wow! Plus from Gardens Alive
• Cockadoodle DOO from Purebarnyard

There are pros and cons to each of these companies; Amazon’s probably the cheapest; Cockadoodle DOO has the advantage of being available in stores; check their site for a store locater.

On the other hand, Gardens Alive has a terrific “Gardens Solution” program – sort of like a frequent-flyer program – which you can use to buy any of their excellent organic gardening products at a discount.

UPDATED: I think the Gardens Alive product works best, overall, but it’s the most expensive. So this past year I tried a new product I found in my local garden store from Espoma, the Holly-Tone people. You can find more info here: http://www.espoma.com/p_consumer/lawn_org_weed.html.

Good luck and healthy gardening!