Choosing organic-Why would you bother?

We are surrounded by a wash of harmful chemicals, so why add more to our food and environment?

Stop and think about what you are applying to your garden too. Choose to use natural products with no added hormones, synthetic chemicals, no irradiation or genetically modified organisms. Truly organic products, not ‘greenwashed’ ones, will have an organic logo resembling a bud or the NASAA organic labelling on the pack.

If we as gardeners and our farmers all went organic, we’d have 30,000 tonnes less ‘chemicals and plant growth regulators in our environment and food each year. We’d have no more hormones or antibiotics in our food that mess with antibiotic resistance and foetal development and we’d be free of genetically modified organisms that are causing issues such as herbicide resistance.

If you ate organic you’d also be eating 2 kilos less food additives per year, as organic food is prepared with minimal processing and no artificial colours, flavours or synthetic preservatives.

So, is going organic in the garden hard to do? No, it’s not, but it does require some re-education.

Organic means looking at the whole not just a part. It’s about making healthy soil, rotating our crops, encouraging beneficial insects and animals and being an observer.

It also means eating seasonally so you don’t have to spray the living daylights out of plants that are not suited to the climate or season, and it’s growing varieties that are resilient to attack.

The Ecobotanica ezine will give you lots more ideas. Why not sign up on the home page?