Organic Gardening is Growing Nature’s Way
Why garden organicaly?
Life in a healthy garden is a strong tapestry of many strands, woven together, interacting to keep any one organism from dominating and causing problems, says Jeff Cox, columnist for Organic Gardening magazine, host of the PBS television series Your Organic Garden and Grow It!, and author of 13 books on organic gardening and landscaping. As there is in the American Constitution, he says, there’s a system of checks and balances.
Given this perspective, it becomes obvious why poisonous chemicals, whether fertilizers, fungicides, insecticides, or herbicides, wreak such havoc in a tightly knit system. These chemicals tear apart nature’s carefully constructed and balanced web of life. Suddenly certain creatures are released from predation and begin to multiply unchecked. What was once merely a happy player in the garden becomes a problem.
But organic gardening is not just about gardening without chemicals. The organic approach is to maximize the diversity of life in the garden. The more kinds of creatures that inhabit a system—whether garden, farm, or rain forest—the healthier it is. Each creature has an ecological role to play. Microorganisms decay fungus strands. Fungus helps disassemble the fallen leaves. Ladybugs eat aphids. Birds eat ladybugs.
Mice eat birds’ eggs. Foxes keep mice in check. And finally, when the foxes die, microorganisms break down their bodies.
Tags: how to organic gardening, Life in a healthy garden, Organic Gardening