Organic Gardening

There seems to be a real fuss at the moment about who’s an organic gardener and who isn’t. To be honest we feel it’s all getting a little over competitive and a worrying case of who can out do the other in a form of gardening one-upmanship.

There is a huge range of gardeners out there. Some who will certainly reach for the sprayer the minute they see an insect of any description (unfortunately either good or bad ones!) and tend to over feed their plants to the eyeballs with chemicals to get them to flower or fruit as profusely as possible. At the other end of the spectrum there are some organic gardeners who are extremely strict about their practices and spend all their time gardening, which is unrealistic for many.

Here at Modular Garden we think of ourselves as ‘easy organic’ gardeners, in other words, someone who does their best in their own patch without getting too evangelical on the subject. We never use pesticides; if things get too bad we’d rather pull out a plant and put something new in rather than spray it to death. We don’t mind the odd snail having a chomp and only use organic feeds and mulches. Occasionally though, very occasionally we have been known to turn to the sprayer for pernicious weeds.

As far as the future’s concerned we’re optimistic. There is no doubt that we are all far more ecology conscious than ever before, and gardeners are more aware than ever of how we look after our patch and the effect it has on the bigger picture. Most schools these days are teaching children to understand their environment and how to respect it in the long term. We’ve absolutely no doubt that things are moving in the right direction, but these things will take time. They always do.

~ by modulargarden on 11 December, 2007.