Expectations around Organic Gardening

by Doug
(in my garden)

I’ve been thinking about organic gardening in general lately and the attitude it takes to be successful at it. Or indeed, the attitude it takes to be successful at any kind of gardening.

There are several issues.

The first is that I’m lazy and I assume you are as well. Let me be honest, if there’s an easy way and a hard way to accomplish the same thing, I’m going to take the easy way every time unless there’s an overwhelming reason to go the hard way.

Example. Weeding. Hmmm, I can pull all those weeds by hand. I can take a tool out and dig them all out by hand. I can spray something and they’ll all disappear. Well, the organic gardeners among us are saying, “Where’s the tool?”. But what if I told you it was a magic fungus that only lived for 2 days and only made dandelions disappear and the sun then destroyed it so it couldn’t multiply. And it was made from the skins of organically grown wheat seedlings? Totally safe. Would your answer change? I’ll bet given the choice of digging in the hot sun or spreading a little bit of this magic fungus on your dandelions, you’d be out doing the spreading and then back into the shade. I would. I’m not a big fan of work for work’s sake and as little as dandelions bother me, a lawn looks better without them. (And for the record, I just made that up about the dandelion killer product) :-)

Why do you think I mulch my gardens and have for years? Is it to make the soil better? Conserve water (I live on one of the Great Lakes surrounded by water) It’s because it cuts down my weeding labor by 80-90%. Let me repeat, I’m a lazy gardener.

So I confess to wanting to take the easy road in gardening whenever possible. And I suspect if you’re being honest you’d be doing the same thing. I override the use of chemicals as "easy" because of my health and environment concerns around their use.

Organic gardening is a bit like the new kid on the block. It’s not necessarily the easiest way to control weeds on the lawn because it does take some physical work (although not as much after a few years). It does take a new way of looking at things and advertisers haven’t exactly been hammering the message through about how to use organic systems in place of the chemical ones they sell. It’s a learning curve to be sure and not necessarily an easy one.

So if you’re stuck in your way of thinking. If you don’t understand or accept the alternative and if it’s going to be harder or more expensive then I can fully understand how you’d resist the entire thought of gardening without chemicals. Heck, chemicals are easier and I confess there are days when I almost wished I’d kept my registration. I had registration for ag-chemicals because I was a registered farmer (tax advantages) and that meant I could get any ag-chemical I needed (not that I needed many given my organic leanings) but I could control the weeds in the nursery with Roundup (back when even Organic Gardening magazine printed about it being used by some leading organic gardening experts). Looking at the mounds of garden thugs around my home (including some that were damaging the siding) and I can only wish for a magic cure instead of the work I’m doing to eradicate this pest. (repeated sprayings with an organic and way too much digging) :-) This is hard work!


Our expectations. We look at house-magazines and pictures of gracious living and everywhere we look there are folks living the good life with scads of flowers, immaculate container gardens and ponds, veggie gardens and shrubs that look like they are in ... well, magazines. No need to tell you these are almost always “staged” with potted perennial plants inserted into the garden and picture-perfect containers being brought in for the photo shoot. Not to mention a little “adjustment” in color here and there or photoshopping to “fix” that small detail. Heck, even in the days before digital cameras and software, I’d be running multiple filters on my lenses to change sky color etc while I was shooting. Our expectations of what we should be able to do with our gardens is as equally false as is the lifestyle or thin, fashionable bodies we “should” be emulating..

Our expectations run smack into the reality of the amount of work necessary to have a picture perfect garden (never mind maintain such a fiction). And we want the size of garden we think we “should” have and we don’t understand how much physical work it takes to maintain a large garden. So we have the desire for less work and the expectation that can only be met with a lot of work - competing for our attention and desire.

Toss in a lack of organic heritage across our society. Most of us gardening didn’t know any other world other than chemical gardening while we were growing up. (yes, a very few did). Toss in advertising and marketing that touts the ease and safety of chemical products. And you wind up with a stew that isn’t necessarily enthusiastic about doing more physical work in a vain attempt to maintain that picture perfect lawn.


Lazy gardeners. Expectations of Success. Lack of Information. Few living heritage examples of our desired behavior.

But it’s why I had difficulty putting together an organic seminar for you - the scope of the subject rolls on and on and on. And it’s why there’s around 5000 pages up on the Net now just dealing with all these things.

I did put up a new left hand navbar link to the weed control section and I’ve just uploaded the results of my vinegar and salt experiments in weed control. I’ll be adding to this section over the next little while as well. You might want to check that out right here. You can ask questions there as well

I’m going to end this “why” part of the organic seminar now and move on to other sessions. They’ll all be organic for sure so stay tuned.