One of the most satisfying ways to become a steward of the planet is to plant a garden. You can grow flowers to beautify indoors and out or vegetables to help to sustain your family’s food or both.

Even if you aren’t interested in maintaining a garden, you can also plant native plants to cut down on the amount of watering that is necessary and contribute to the health of the earth. But many people these days are turning to organic gardening and permaculture to tend their backyards or front yards, for that matter.

Let’s begin with organic gardening which at its simplest can be defined as gardening without chemicals. It’s interesting to consider that it’s only for the last few decades that anything other than organic gardening was performed on the planet.

Farmers and gardeners worked the soil through organic means for millennia. But then in the 1920s, mass farming became more and more the means through which our food was grown, and it depended on high yields, quick growth and more profitable methods. This came to mean reliance on chemicals and fertilizers with little care or concern for the long-term impact of these products. And these ideas spilled over to urban and suburban gardeners, who wanted the greenest lawns, and the lushest roses with little concern for the consequences of the chemicals they used.

But many commercial pesticides such as DDT have been outlawed and gradually more and more attention has been paid to the pitfalls of mass farming and gardening with chemicals. Now most home gardeners would agree that organic gardening is the way to go, and it has come to mean a whole approach to gardening that is a balanced way of looking at things.

One of the cornerstones of organic gardening is using compost, and we’ve already discussed that at length in the section on recycling. Just be aware that if you’ve not used compost in your garden before, you are in for a big surprise at how much your plants will like it. You can easily say no to chemical fertilizers if you practice integrated pest management. And you can say goodbye to weeds using the techniques of weed-free garden design.

There are other cornerstones to organic gardening. They include learning to understand and mimic nature, which involves looking at your garden as a whole, functioning system; celebrating diversity, and growing each plant in a natural location for it.

You can also apply organic gardening to lawn care with a few simple principles: use a natural, organic fertilizer; don’t over water; aerate; mow high, and control bugs naturally.

Tags: organic gardening

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.