basic Organic versus Chemical Gardening -A summary

Hi folks I just wrote this for the Organic list and thought it might
interest some of you, so I have taken the liberty of sending you a copy

There are two main ways one can garden:-

A)The Hi-tech way (based on chemical fertilizers and pesticides).

Advantages
1)It can even be done by just anybody without any actual knowledge or
involvment with real gardening simply by following a standard pattern
recommended by the sellers of the necessary materials, such as is
obvously the case with some garden maintenance contractors one hears
about and many home-owners.
2)etc ???

Disadvantages
1) Expenses are never-ending, because not only does one pay in the first
instance for the fertilizers, but because these have a bad influence on
the health of the plants, sprays follow, and for insecticides in
particular, as they regularly destroy many valuable predators along with
the pests, the problems increase progressively. Many of the more complex
(and expensive) pesticides are also notorious for quite rapidly losing
their effectiveness as the pests so easily develop resistance to them.

Because the fertilizers commonly used are virtually all highly soluble 
any supplies not immediately used rapidly wash away  and then they need
to be reapplied.
With time also the doses required to achieve a given  growth level tend
to increase until the response can become so poor the site may need to
be abandoned.

2) Even if reinforced with the addition of compost (which slows down but
cannot halt the degeneration), the soil structure begins to break down,
losing much of its penetrability (by air, water and roots) and its
water-holding capacity.
In time many  such soils can set like concrete and all are less able to
survive drought than their organic counterparts. Openness can be
partially  restored by cultivation, but the effects are notoriously
short-lived.

3) Along with the loss of structure the soil's ability to retain food
decreases and more and more will be wasted by leaching (washing down to
unreachable depths by water).

4) the quality of food crops grown chemically is noticeably inferior to
the organic ones, especially in nutritional balance and mineral content
(and amny people insist the organic ones also taste so much better)..
In some cases over-application of  nitrogen can actually render the
plant dangerous to eat by producing poisonous nitrosamines.

B) The Organic Way

Contrary to some popular ideas this is NOT a policy of /laissez faire/,
but an intelligent attempt to follow as closely as practical a natural
way of _maintaining_ the soil, which nature has perfected over billions
of
years.

Advantages.

1) Input costs may often be kept down, even initially, as the materials
used (all organic) can often be scrounged, found already on the property
as "rubbish" (lawn clippings or fallen leaves for instance) or obtained
at low cost. And if one is really lucky there might even be some sort of
compost heap!!

Once established this can be virtually a self-sustaining operation,
based on home-produced compost and mulches, with eventually an absolute
minimum of purchased supplementation.

2) This treatment will in time produce, even in initially very damaged
sites, a very active live soil which  exhibits all the desirable
properties associated with a good humus content, such as efficient
moisture and food storage and particularly a natural spongy texture of
considerable strength and resistance to treading, which ensures the
maximum of good underground plant growth by allowing easy  penetration
of essential oxygen and moisture and facilitating  the spreading  of the
roots.
3) although a vast mumber of organisms are involved in the care of a
live soil one of the very useful groups is undoubtedly the earthworms.
They simply cannot live in chemical soils, but when organic methods are
introduced the usually increase remarkably and their effect on the soil,
particularly in the incorporation and first processing of organic food
materials and in the formation of the larger soil pores, is extremely
important. 

4) To establish and  maintain this valuable structure the best approach
has
been proved many times now to be not to till, never digging compost or
manure into the soil, but applying all materials the natural way to the
surface for the organisms to draw on as required.

To the surprise of most gardeners,  even many of those with long
experience this treatment, which really can seem counter-intuitive when
first encountered, has proved to work not only with easy loamy textured
soils but also to be the best approach for the really difficult ones
like clays and sands.Even light tilling is destructive of the structure
which is so laboriously being built up and buried organic materials
become soil much less easily than those left on the surface where there
is plenty of oxygen to process them.

>From the practical point of view it greatly reduces the actual manual
work involved -very good especially for old bodies like mine!

4) The vigour of the plants and their high health is reflected in their
general resistance to pests and diseases.

Fully organic growers use no poisonous sprays at all. For the rare
insect pests they may employ mechanical means of control such as
barriers, water-jets, hand picking or excluding fabric covers; rarely
they may
need to use a smothering oil or set sticky traps. but in well establised
gardens even this much exertion may not be necessary as they throw the
onus back on nature by encouraging helpful predatory insects, and even
insect-eating birds, by the provision of suitable food plants to lure
them to live in their patch. Another similar strategy is to provide
areas
of suitable weeds such as Carol's famous "north forty" (though small
patches here and there also work). Many times the weeds will prove as
desirable, or even more so, to the pests than the crops, and they will
actually feed there for preference, not only saving the crop but at the
same time providing  a good food supply for the friendly preditors so
they will stay around.

Disease organisms are perhaps less easy to dispose of, but newly
researched techniques involve treatments to prevent  fungus spores
establishing theselves on the plants which employ( Very effectively)
such harmless spray materials as compost teas and diluted low-fat milk.

Diadvantages
1) it may involve some expense at the setting-up stage for extra food,
especially if one is dealing with a starved soil orespeciall, one badly
damaged by chemical growing. Even more to the point,  such soils will
demand patience as they may take several years until they are once more
fully enlivened. However once this is achieved they may be kept in
production indefinitly by quite light annual dressings of home-made
compost applied under an inexpensive protective  organic mulch. 
2) etc ???

Moira
-- 
Tony & Moira Ryan,
Wainuiomata, North Island, NZ.     Pictures of our garden at:-
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cherie1/Garden/TonyandMoira/index.htm
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