What Are The Benefits Of Organic Gardening?

Many people have been seeing the benefits of organic gardening in their lives over the last few decades. It is a way of cultivating plants that does not use artificial chemicals that may damage the planet, kill wildlife and possibly injure the health of people who eat the produce that is grown with the aid of these pesticides and weed killers.


It is too soon to be sure what the effects of mass chemically assisted agriculture and genetically modified crops will be, either on consumers or on the earth. They simply have not been around long enough for anybody to be sure. In the face of this uncertainty, more and more people are turning to organically grown fruit and vegetables, and meat which has been reared on organic land.


Organic gardening and agriculture is nothing new. In fact, if you go back beyond the last 60 years or so, everything was grown organically because laboratory-produced pesticides and fertilizers simply did not exist.


We tend to think of organic food as a modern trend, but it is not at all. The word is new because there was no need for it before, that is all. The organic way of growing things was practiced throughout history from the time that people first learned to plant seeds until very recent times. It is the chemicals that are the modern aspect.


It was the introduction of the pesticide DDT in farming in the 1950s that led to a turn in public opinion. Books like 'Silent Spring' by the well known natural historian Rachel Carson, published in 1962, started an environmental movement that has grown steadily in the decades since. The book's title came from the discovery that DDT was damaging the egg shells of birds, preventing them from reproducing. At the same time, it killed many of the insects that were their food. Carson envisaged a world where there would be no more bird songs.


Largely as a result of this movement, DDT is now illegal in almost all countries. However, many other pesticides are available both to farmers and to us as gardeners which we cannot assess what the long term effects of using them will be yet.


Most gardeners have a fairly small area of land to nurture and there is no need to use chemical sprays on our home grown flowers and vegetables. If our tomato crop fails one year, we will not starve. If our honeysuckle becomes diseased, perhaps it is time to replace it with another climbing plant.  If our roses are home to more insects than we would like, we can wash them off or encourage their natural predators to inhabit our garden too.


There may be more benefits of organic gardening than we currently know. Isn't it better to not take chances with our land, our lives and our childrens' health?