Old-Time Gardening Resource On The Cheap

Have you ever wondered if pre-WWII farming and gardening were really the idyllic organic paradise that modern nostalgia paints? 100 years ago market gardeners AND backyard vegetable growers were using lead arsenates as pesticides. Lead and arsenic! I kid you not! Here's a quote from Ida Bennett, The Vegetable Garden, 1909:

"If a cabbage is clean and bright, the outer leaves clean and fresh, what more could one ask? Well, to the initiated there sometimes does arise a question as to how all this immaculate crispness and freedom from the trail of the worm was attained. After even a few years' experience in the growing of cabbages and allied plants, one comes to know that their growing on any large scale, especially on old land, is not the simple or always the cleanly thing it seems."

They worried about overly-perfect-looking produce just like modern moms do, and for similar reasons. They knew lead and arsenic were poisons.

How did I learn this? Go to Google Books. Google "vegetable gardening" or your topic of choice, full view. You'll find public domain books, scanned for your convenience into PDF files. They tell how it was really done in the old days. And you can find valuable hints about how to revive skills you are too young to remember.