Many people are unsure exactly what is meant by organic gardening.
Although it wasn’t labeled as such, organic gardening was practiced way back when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock. Remember the story of the Indians teaching the Pilgrims to bury dead fish between the corn rows to help the corn grow better?
Organic gardening and farming was a way of life until the early 1900s when artificial fertilizers and synthetic pesticides were first produced. Following World War II, much of the technology developed for use in the war was brought home and applied to farming methods. After the war, chemical farming became the predominant method used in North America and Europe.
However, a few people began to realize that when a chemical short-cut is used to achieve a gardening goal, you get a short-term solution carrying with it a bunch of negative side effects. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 many more people became aware of the horrible things they were doing to the earth and to themselves by using chemicals on their farms and in their gardens. Yet forty years later, people are still dissolving boxes of blue chemicals in water and sprinkling poison on their gardens.
People seem to know more about what organic gardeners don’t do than what they do do. Organic gardeners don’t use chemical pesticides or fertilizers. They do try to emulate what Mother Nature does in the natural ecosystem of a meadow or forest. They realize that nature’s cycle of growth, death and decay is continuous. As plants and animals die, earthworms, insects and microscopic soil creatures consume them and nutrients are released to feed the next generation of plants. This is called composting.
Organic gardeners keep an eye on their gardens so that if a pest or disease problem develops it can be taken care of before it becomes severe. They also realize that all the bugs they see in the garden are not their enemies. There are many good bugs that eat bad bugs. Organic gardeners learn to grow plants to attract the good bugs.
If you are not yet an organic gardener but would like to be one, it may seem like a lot of work and learning is ahead. But it really is quite easy and you don’t have to do it all at once.
First, take your bags, bottles and cans of synthetic yard and garden chemicals to the Hazardous Waste collection site in your county. Then, rake up this year’s leaves, shred them with your mower, and spread them on your garden beds. If they haven’t decomposed entirely by spring, dig them into the beds.
You don’t have to mix up your own potions to be an organic gardener, and don’t even have to make your own compost, although all that can be fun. You can buy just as many bottles and bags of organic fixes as you used to buy synthetic ones from Gardens Alive (www.gardensalive.com).
Organic Gardening (www.organicgardening.com) is an easy-to-read and educational magazine to which you can subscribe to learn more.
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