Organic Gardening – What is it? This should be a simple question, and many of you may think you know the answer, but the answer is more complicated than you think.
I consider myself an organic gardener – but some of you won’t agree because I do use some Roundup.
Can you garden organically and still use Roundup? Can you be ‘sort of’ organic and still consider yourself an organic gardener? Do organic gardeners make the best environmental choices?
Lots of people are looking to buy organic seeds but as a chemist this has never made any sense to me. I started asking people on social media for their reasons for selecting organic seeds over conventional seeds or heirlooms seeds. The answers clearly indicate that people don’t understand why they want organic seeds, but one valid reason did emerge.
In this post I will look at the reasons people give for buying organic seed and discuss the validity of the reasons.
Compost is good for the garden, in part, because it adds nutrients for the plants. That sounds like a fertilizer. But almost everything you read says that compost is NOT a fertilizer. Something doesn’t make sense—let’s have a closer look at this myth. Is compost an organic fertilizer?
In my last post What is Organic Fertilizer I explained why the nutrients in organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer are the same. Plants can’t tell the difference between the two because there is no difference. However, organic fertilizer is better for the garden. In this post we will look at why this is true.
If you read a number of web sites, especially organic gardening ones, you quickly realize that there are two basic kinds of fertilizer. There is the ‘synthetic fertilizer’ which you buy in bags. This fertilizer is clearly BAD! Then there is the good stuff; organic fertilizer.
What is the real difference between organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer? Is there a difference? The answer may surprise you.
Brewing manure tea is a sin. Not a religious sin, but an organic gardening sin.
You are probably sitting there thinking – is this guy crazy? Compost is organic and so the brewed tea from compost or manure must also be organic. Read on and I just might convince you that compost tea is NOT very organic!
Chemicals are those nasty man-made synthetic products that are destroying the environment and harming ourselves. This is how the general public and organic zealots in particular view chemicals. Nothing can be further from the truth – this is a common garden myth.
You see the word organic used everywhere these days so you would think that the word has a simple definition. Not so.
The word is used by different groups of people to mean different things.
