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Growing Organically
On this page, find information to guide your understanding of the fundamentals of organic gardening and practices you can use in a home vegetable garden, including:
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- Organic, natural, and healthy garden practices and methods.
- Traditional gardening practices.
- Organic solutions to plant pest and disease problems.
- The gardener’s role in growing organic produce, fruit, and berries.
- Explanation of the core precepts of Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a recommended way of growing vegetables with sound and sustainable ecological and environmental gardening practices.
Organic Vegetable Gardening
Organic gardening’s goal is to achieve balance between food safety and plant health while avoiding losses to plant diseases or pests and reducing impact on the environment.
Many gardeners prefer natural and organic methods that avoid garden chemicals, sprays, powders, and synthetic fertilizers. It’s important to understand what the terms “natural” and “organic” mean in the context of a vegetable garden.
The truth is, there’s no commonly agreed meaning to the term “natural,” but many relate it to healthy, safe and unprocessed.
This ignores that some truly natural products are very unhealthy indeed; arsenic is one example, an alkaloid, naturally occurring mineral and chemical element.
There are many other examples.
Organic, in a chemist’s eyes, is any molecule that that contains atoms of carbon. Those seeking organic gardens have arrived before they departed: their gardens contain soil, plants, and living microbes, worms and other living creatures — all built out of carbon-containing organic compounds.
What most mean by these terms is growing fruit, leafy greens and vegetables in the manner our ancestors did.
They build soils for planting with compost produced from decayed foliage. They fertilize with manure from farm animals or plant and turn under cover crops to add nutrients. They avoid the production methods commonly used by large agriculture.
Importantly, they prefer to avoid all use of manmade pesticides, herbicides, and harsh plant disease treatments.
For them, the goal is to achieve a balance between their garden’s yield and avoidable crop losses due to disease and insects. They want to protect the health of their family and make the food they eat as safe and wholesome as possible.
Organic Gardening Requires Many Choices
To garden organically most gardeners use smothering soaps and baits rather than killing pests with control agents and, when heavy infestations occur, they apply pest sprays derived from naturally occurring sources like chrysanthemums or the sap and oils of trees instead of synthetic compounds.
Others choose natural predator insects — examples include preying mantises and lady-bird beetles — to control plant-eating insects that harm their vegetables. Still others prefer hand controls — picking, swatting and squashing — or patrol and inspect their garden frequently to catch pests and diseases before they damage their vegetable plants.
To be effective, these methods must be used early and often—at the first sign of pest or disease damage.Avoid some conditions by planting disease- and pest-resistant varieties.
All gardeners should use good practices and healthy care methods to give plants the best chance to fight off attackers [see Caring].
Another strategy is to plan and plant vegetable gardens made up of many small plots, with several crop types in each section. That stops large crowds of one-vegetable pests from moving in and growing to large numbers in a large block planted to one variety of plants.
Remove and apply new mulch several times a season to eliminate the eggs of insect pests before they hatch and become a vegetable garden problem. Put “bug boards” as stepping paths down your rows. When slugs, snails and insects hide beneath them, pick up the board and kill the pests before they scurry or slide away.
Encourage helpful insects to move in, or release those predators known to help control harmful pests: lacewings, trichogramma wasps, frogs, toads and lizards.
Recognize that some damage to your vegetables is inevitable. Wash surface insects away with mildly soapy water. Follow the rules of Integrated Pest Management if infestations become severe [see Integrated Pest Management.] Treatment of infested plants with a spray containing the living bacteria BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) is harmless to humans, but controls larvae and caterpillars of some pests.
Living and gardening organically and naturally safeguards produce you grow in your home vegetable garden from most health hazards introduced during cultivation.
Innovative Organic Pest Controls
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